Question: What is the difference between mathematical science and norma science and which do you find more interessting?

Edward Codling answered on 16 Jun 2011:

Wow – great question!

I don’t think maths is really that different to other sciences. The biggest difference is that in many maths problems the answer is exact and you can tell if you are right or wrong (often in maths we have to ‘prove’ a particular result as well using a mathematical argument). With other sciences like ecology there is never usually an exact answer – things are a bit more ‘fuzzy’ and uncertain.

However, the basic approach – you come up with an idea, test it and then find evidence that your idea is right or wrong works both in maths and in other sciences as well. The maths that I do varies – I have done some work that involved finding equations that described how animal populations moved and spread about in space. You can also do similar problems using computer simulations (which I’ve done as well – check the pictures in my profile). I have also used maths to calculate what the best catches are for various fisheries – some of this work has even been used by the European fisheries people who decide how many fish can be caught in Europe each year.

The computer simulations I do often don’t have an exact answer. For example we might try to explore what animals groups do under certain conditions. This involves something very similar to playing a computer game (a bit like Sims) – we give each animal some rules for how they behave and then see what happens to the whole population after a certain time. We usually get different results each time we run the simulation so we have to run it lots of times and look for the average or typical behaviour and see if we can understand why that happens. Because the simulations don’t give exact answers it is very similar to other sciences – we have to run experiments, collect data and then decide how to interpret our results.

Maths is also used across all the other sciences when scientists want to analyse and understand the data they have collected. This part of maths is known as statistics – you may have done this in your maths lessons! Statistics is the application of maths to problems where the data is often highly variable and uncertain. Statistics can’t give us an exact answer usually – instead we often have to work with a probability of a certain result being true. This is why many science experiments have to be run lots of times and why there is often arguments about whether a particular result is true or not!

I hope that helps – let me know if you want a bit more explanation! 🙂