Today's Question:  What does your personal desk look like?        GIVE A SHOUT

Surprising applications of math

  John D. Cook        2011-11-18 09:24:19       2,069        0    

The comments in the previous post touched on surprising applications of math, so I thought I’d expand this theme into it’s own post. Below I’ll give a couple general examples of surprising applications and then I’ll give a couple more personal applications I found surprising.

Number theory has traditionally been the purest of pure mathematics. People study number theory for the joy of doing so, not to make money. At least that was largely true until the advent of public key cryptography. The difficulty of solving certain number theory problems now ensures the difficulty of decrypting private communication, or so we hope. (By the way, I’ve always thought Euler deserved part of the credit for the RSA encryption scheme. Maybe it should be called RSAE encryption. R, S, and A came up with the brilliant idea to apply E’s theorem to cryptography.)

Non-euclidean geometry started as a pure mathematical abstraction. Of course the physical world is Euclidean, but let’s see what happens if we monkey with Euclid’s fifth postulate. Then along came Einstein and suddenly the real world is non-Euclidean.

One personal application of math that I found surprising was using Fibonacci numbers in practical computation. Computing Fibonacci numbers is a computer science cliché, but I actually needed to compute Fibonacci numbers for a numerical integration problem. I wrote up the details in Fibonacci numbers at work.

Another application that surprised me was using the trapezoid rule for real work. The trapezoid rule is a crude numerical integration technique. It’s good for teaching because it’s very simple, but it’s not very accurate. Or so I thought. It’s not very accurate in general, but in the right circumstances, it can be extraordinarily accurate. I explain more in Three surprises with the trapezoid rule.

One surprising non-application has been differential equations. For the past three centuries, differential equations have been at the heart of applied math. One could argue that to first approximation, applied math equals differential equations and supporting material. But I personally have not had nearly as much opportunity to use differential equations professionally as I expected, even though that was my specialization in grad school.

Source:http://www.johndcook.com/blog/2011/11/17/surprising-applications-of-math/

MATH  ALGORITHMS  NUMBER THEORY  DIFFERENTIAL EUQATION 

Share on Facebook  Share on Twitter  Share on Weibo  Share on Reddit 

  RELATED


  0 COMMENT


No comment for this article.