• Question: how does your job involve maths

    Asked by hand522qats on 6 Mar 2025. This question was also asked by teed522sudd.
    • Photo: Jan McKendrick

      Jan McKendrick answered on 6 Mar 2025:

      I work with doctors and researchers who are trying to find new medicines that can help people that are sick. To find out if something works or not you need to do experiments – I help to work out what that experiment needs to be so that we can do good analyses of data afterwards. Its not any good if there is a good new medicine but you cant prove it – so maths is really important.

      Lots of new medicines use very clever science and so they can cost a lot. Part of my job is to work out what you are getting for your money – can people have a shorter time in hospital, can they get back to work earlier, can they avoid traveling to a specialist medical centre and be treated nearer home; all those things are also costs.

      So my job is a little maths, a little finances and a little economics

    • Photo: Callum Morris

      Callum Morris answered on 20 Mar 2025:

      Maths is key part of my job, whether is using it calculate losses from systems due to leaks, establishing design conditions for new processes, completing chemical equations for reaction rates.

      The maths may not go to into the fully complex concepts that are discussed in higher level maths, but I do use algebra and basic arithmetic on a daily basis.

      Maths is a key skill used within all engineering disciplines to varying degrees.

    • Photo: Charlotte Heaven

      Charlotte Heaven answered on 4 Apr 2025:

      My job creates computer models of what happens to tumours after cancer treatment. To do this I use maths equations to represent how a population of cells might grow and then I look at what happens to this growth when we remove parts of the population. Because I am looking at what happens if we use two treatments together, I can start the model with different values or change the amount of cells removed at different points and I can use this to predict how much of each treatment we would have to give this tumour to destroy it.

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