Swine Flu

Swine Flu is bad. It has killed a few people and has the potential to kill many more. However the good side to it is the wonderful maths in the news stories that abound. How can people say maths is irrelevant when understanding the numbers behind this outbreak could save the world from total annihilation? Maybe that is slightly over-dramatic but then so are most pieces connected to Swine Flu. The TV, Internet and newspapers have been full of graphs with their peaks and troughs (sorry). Here is a link to a Plus article that takes a much deeper look into the maths behind the hyperbole.

Differential Equations

If you are a member of one of my year thirteen C4 classes and you haven’t quite understood Differential Equations yet then this post might be of some use to you.

I like the clarity of the expositions on this blog and I will post some more links as and when.

Mathematics and Climate

Here is a weighty article that tries to give an overview of how the climate and weather can be modelled with mathematics. The article highlights the importance of Fluid Dynamics and therefore Differential Equations in the modelling.

The article is taken from the American Mathematical Society’s series of monthly essays on the use of mathematics. They are supposed to be for the general public but they can be quite challenging. The authors appear to recognise this and ask that if you get a bit stuck that you carry on reading and you will still get something from the essays. Here is a link to the back catalogue.