• Question: What is your favourite thing maths can do, and what do you work on?

    Asked by Noor on 7 Jan 2020. This question was also asked by bag9, evelynlaver, rh123, freya whiting ✌.
    • Photo: Sophie Carr

      Sophie Carr answered on 7 Jan 2020:

      My favourite thing maths can do is help us explain things – it helps us make sense of the world. I work mainly in statistics so I find patterns and try to understand what these mean and how we can use them to help us.

    • Photo: Maja Popovic

      Maja Popovic answered on 8 Jan 2020:

      Maths can explain certain things about a language. For example, there is a text and you don’t know which language it is written in.
      So for each word in this text, you count how many times it appears. And then you take five most frequent words (with highest percentages):
      . 5%
      the 4.2%
      , 4.1%
      a 2.4%
      to 2.3%
      You can now be pretty sure that that is an English text.
      Furthermore, you can count the endings of words, so if you have a lot of “ed”s, you can be even more convinced that this is English.

      And if you apply some more complicated percentages related to words, you can automatically find out whether the English text was written directly in English, or was translated from some other language.

    • Photo: Fiona Macfarlane

      Fiona Macfarlane answered on 8 Jan 2020:

      I like that maths can help us make sense of things that may seem to be random. I work mainly on creating models of cancer and other diseases to look at how they develop and the best way to treat them

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