How maths underpins science

BBC Inside Science

BBC

Technology, Science

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 30 May 2019

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Adam Rutherford and guests at the Hay Festival discuss how maths underwrites all branches of science, and is at the foundation of the modern world. His guests are the following. Professor Steve Strogatz, of Cornell University, the author of a new book on calculus, Infinite Powers. He’s worked on all kinds of problems including some biological ones such as the shape of DNA, how fireflies create light and the grandness of small world theories. Dr Emily Shuckburgh, is a climate change scientist at University of Cambridge, who has a PhD in maths studying fluid dynamics. She is the co-author of the Ladybird book on Climate Change with Prince Charles, Sir Venki Ramakrishnan, is President of the Royal Society, and was originally a physicist, who moved into biology, to study the 3-dimensional shape of one of the most important biological structures, the ribosome, for which he won the Nobel prize winner.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and trust me you'll get there in a moment but if you're a comedy fan
0:05.2	I'd really like to tell you a bit about what we do. I'm Julie Mackenzie and I commission comedy
0:10.2	podcast at the BBC. It's a bit of a dream job really.
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0:18.0	making people's days a bit better, helping them process, all manner of things.
0:22.0	But you know I also know that comedy is really
0:24.4	subjective and everyone has different tastes so we've got a huge range of comedy on offer
0:29.6	from satire to silly shocking to soothing profound to just general pratting about. So if you
0:36.2	fancy a laugh, find your next comedy at BBC Sounds.
0:41.6	BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.
0:45.0	Hello and welcome to Inside Science at the Hay Festival.
0:52.0	Now we talk about all branches of what we call the STEM subjects, that science, technology, engineering and math. And it's kind of fitting that the M for maths comes last there.
1:03.0	There's an old, not very funny joke that in the sciences
1:06.9	that psychology is just applied biology,
1:09.1	biology is just applied chemistry,
1:11.2	chemistry is just applied physics, and physics is just applied chemistry. Chemistry is just applied physics,
1:12.8	and physics is just applied maths,
1:15.1	and the buck stops there.
1:16.9	I did warn you it wasn't very funny.
1:19.2	But it is kind of true.
1:21.8	Maths is the universal language of science and of engineering and effectively it is the language
1:27.9	of the universe.
	...

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