Question: How usefull do you think maths is in science?

Leo Beacroft answered on 12 Jun 2018:

Great question George. Maths is incredibly useful in science, it’s one of the most useful skills a scientist can have in my opinion. There are lots of different ways in which maths can be used in science and I’ll try to tell you a few.

Large areas of science are becoming automated, so experiments can be done by machines and computers. This involves maths in lots of different ways. Here’s one example, DNA the “instruction manual” for the human body (and all other living things) is made up of molecules that we call “nucleotides”, which you can think of as the letters of the instruction manual. The problem is that all of the DNA in most living things is millions or billions of letters long, so it’s not really possible for people to read them. Biologists and computer scientists have designed computer programs that can “read” all the DNA sequences and make sense of them. We can work out which bits of the DNA sequence belong to certain genes, we can use maths and computing to compare the DNA of two people, to work out how closely related they are. Some of the maths will be similar to the way Google searches the internet, it’s about comparing sequences of letters to see if they’re the same.

Ok, I’ll admit the next one is copied from another related question that I already answered.
Scientists like myself can use equations to describe how a disease spreads and this can help to predict how it might spread in the future. Let’s use a simple example. Imagine we want to know how many people will have flu at the end of next week. We could write this as an equation.
T = a + n – r
T is the total number infected at the end of one week
a is the number already infected at the start of the week
n is the number of new infections during the week
r is the number of people who recover during the week, that’s people who were infected but get better.
What’s interesting is that all of these things are related to each other. If “a” is large, then there are a lot of infected people to spread the flu so “n” will be large too. We can build this into our equation to make it more complicated. We can go further; we can think about how many people each person with flu is likely to pass the disease on to. We know flu is spread through water droplets in the air, often through coughs and sneezes. The number of people that a person spreads the disease to depends on how many people they come into contact with. If someone is ill and they stay at home by themselves, they might not spread it to anyone, but if they go to work in a busy office, or school, they could spread it to 20, 30 or more people. When scientists are writing equations, we try to think about these different types of people, how many people will stay at home? How many people will come into contact a few people, how many will come into contact with lots of people?

There are loads more ways that maths is useful in science (probably lots that I don’t know too).
Thanks George, hope that all makes sense, let me know if not!