Maths in everyday life

Maths is everywhere. Without realising, we use maths every day, and it plays a part in nearly all our daily activities. Every time we pick up the phone, use the internet, manage money, decide to take a risk, check the weather report, go to the doctors or travel anywhere, maths plays its part.

The weather

You wake up in the morning and get ready to go out. You check the weather report to decide what to wear and what to take - an umbrella? Sunglasses? A hat? The forecasts you read in the paper are a result of solving complicated equations involving the way air, clouds and water move around the planet - part of an area of mathematics called fluid dynamics.

Long-term weather trends can affect our whole environment. For instance, climate change might lead to more storms and more floods. These problems are part of the work of environmental statisticians who study data received from around the world and try to predict what might happen over the next several years. For more information related to this subject please visit the RSS guide to environmental statistics link below.

Buildings and construction

If it is rainy and cold outside, you will be happy to stay at home a while longer and have a nice hot cup of tea. But someone has built the house you are in, made sure it keeps the cold out and the warmth in, and provided you with running water for the tea. This someone is most likely an engineer. Engineers are responsible for just about everything we take for granted in the world around us, from tall buildings, tunnels and football stadiums, to access to clean drinking water. They also design and build vehicles, aircraft, boats and ships. What's more, engineers help to develop things which are important for the future, such as generating energy from the sun, wind or waves. Maths is involved in everything an engineer does, whether it is working out how much concrete is needed to build a bridge, or determining the amount of solar energy necessary to power a car.

Money

Once out the door you walk past a newsstand where the headline "house prices boom again" scream from the front pages. House prices are determined by supply and demand, and the one thing anyone buying a house needs is money. Most people get a loan from a bank to buy a house, and then have to pay back the money they borrowed plus some interest and fees. To choose which bank to borrow from, and to decide if you can afford to borrow at all, you need to understand compound interest.

The housing market is part of the bigger economic picture. How the economy is doing affects how much things cost, how much we are paid and how much the government spends - and maths is used to monitor the economy and predict how it will change. A large part of the world's economy is invested in the stock market, and highly skilled mathematicians are employed to try to understand, and even predict, movements in the stock market.

Planning

Whether you are managing money (trying to save for a gap-year holiday), resources (trying to make those Easter eggs last) or time (deciding how much time to spend on studying for each subject), you are doing calculations, sometimes automatically in your head, trying to optimise your outputs (money saved, grades achieved) given your inputs (pay from part-time job, hours in the day). In industry this is called operational research, and is used to improve the processes used in manufacturing, in how businesses are run, and in making the best use of resources such as beds in a hospital or police on the beat.

Transport

You wait for the bus. Maths is used to timetable buses, trains and planes, taking into account the limited stocks of vehicles, the cost of fuel and the number of people wanting to use them for various journeys across the day. It is used to decide the timing of traffic lights, and to understand traffic flow and congestion. This is another application of operational research (see planning).

Maths also affects the designs of these vehicles, particularly planes, cars and boats. Aerodynamics, another application of fluid dynamics, is obviously vital in designing a plane that can actually fly, but is also important in designing any sort of vehicle to move as smoothly through the air as possible so that it can go faster and take less fuel.

Understanding chance and risk

You get off the bus and someone is selling tickets in a raffle for a new car. Should you buy one? What are the chances of you winning in this, or in any other, lottery? All games of chance are governed by probabilities of events happening. If you understand probability, you have a much better chance of coming out on top, or in deciding that it's not worth spending your money at all.

The bus got stuck in traffic, and you arrived at your destination really late. Should you ride your bike next time, you wonder. But is that too risky? And, if you do, should you wear a helmet?

Your friend calls you to say she has had some negative test results from the doctor. Is she definitely sick, or what are the chances that the test is wrong and she is not sick at all? There are a number of treatment options available, but all have different rates of success and different side effects. To decide which one to take, she will need to weigh up the risks of side effects of each treatment against the chances of success, using the probabilities of each of these.

Business and industry also need to make decisions about risk and chance and need mathematicians - or operational researchers - to help them with this.

Communicating

Finally you get home and get a chance to check your email. Computers store all information as binary numbers, and use mathematical operations to manipulate this information, whether you are editing an email, resizing a photo or setting preferences in your web browser.

Computers communicate digitally, sending packets of information across networks or wires, fibre optic cables and phone lines. The way this information is encoded uses maths. Maths is also used to create better compression methods, so that you can download mp3s faster, or that movie makers can fit longer movies and more special features on DVDs.

Market research

Have you ever been stopped by someone in the street wanting you to complete a questionnaire? If yes, have you thought about what happens to these answers?

All the data collected will be analysed by market researchers and statisticians, who then work out what people actually want. This could be something like finding out what people think about a new mobile phone, the look of a new MP3 player, anything really.

Market research is carried out by almost every business to make sure the products or services fulfil the consumer’s wants and needs. This helps the company stay ahead of the competition.

Our planet and us

At the end of a long day you finally go to bed. The Sun has gone down and you know for certain that it will rise again tomorrow, and so does every other living thing on Earth. The life of every animal and plant is governed by the movement of the Earth around the Sun, and every animal and plant is perfectly adapted to the environment it lives in.

We humans try to understand the natural world around us using sciences like physics and biology. These sciences are written in the language of maths. Physicists and astronomers use mathematical formulae to express the secrets of the universe and to send humans into space. Biologists believe that the secret of life lies in the genes and mathematical processes determine how genes get passed on and cause animals and plants to evolve so that they fit their environment perfectly. Our brains work because of the complicated interaction of neurons — so complicated that only maths has a chance to describe it. Even the way the patterns form on a Leopard’s coat is best understood using maths.

Just a day like any other. And, like any other day, one where mathematics has played a major part.