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Asked by were522case on 24 Jan 2025.
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Paul Terrill answered on 24 Jan 2025:
For me personally these days, not a huge amount of actual hands on maths. I do a lot of logical thinking that is based around statistical ideas but I wouldn’t really call it ‘doing maths’. Maybe less than an hour most days!
I do also look at and check other people’s work where they use maths to do statistical analyses. They do a lot more than me!
Earlier in my career I maybe spent 2 to 3 hours a day doing statistical analyses.
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Nik Robinson answered on 20 May 2025:
Maths is in everything.
How much water to put in the kettle to make two cups of tea in the morning (usually between 0.5 & 0.75 L).
Days, dates, and times of meetings.
Then work wise, I might need to change the units of various chemicals from US to UK/SI units, the US use barrels (bbl) and we would use Litres or Cubic Metres.
Then for my environmental risk assessment work, I have a big spreadsheet model, that takes various input values, e.g. quantitiy of each chemical, used, their biodegradation rate, and their toxicity, and then use these values to calculate how much of the chemical might be discharged and whether it would reach a toxic concentration in the environment.
If we can demonstrate that toxicity will not be reached, then the productis safe to use.
Accounting uses a lot of maths too, budgets, estimates, billing, and so on.
So maths is in everything we do!
Comments
Edward commented on :
Not as much as I would like. I used to do a lot when I was a junior researcher as I was just focussed on one or two projects and actively writing code, solving equations and developing models. Then, as you progress, you take more leadership duties and less programming/maths tasks as you have junior staff to work on that.
I do maths and programming every so often as I enjoy it but it is also satisfying to guide others.
Even if you aren’t doing the maths in university, you still need to check what others are doing so the knowledge is still very useful.