Maths in everyday life

Maths is everywhere. Without realizing, we use maths every day, and it plays a part in nearly all our daily activities. Every time we pick up the phone, use the internet, manage money, decide to take a risk, check the weather report, go to the doctors or travel anywhere, maths plays its part.

The weather
You wake up in the morning and get ready to go out. You check the weather report to decide what to wear and what to take - an umbrella? Sunglasses? A hat? The forecasts you read in the paper are a result of solving complicated equations involving the way air, clouds and water move around the planet - part of an area of mathematics called fluid dynamics.
Long-term weather trends can affect our whole environment. For instance, climate change might lead to more storms and more floods. These problems are part of the work of environmental statisticians who study data received from around the world and try to predict what might happen over the next several years. For more information related to this subject please visit the RSS guide to environmental statistics link below.

Buildings and construction
If it is rainy and cold outside, you will be happy to stay at home a while longer and have a nice hot cup of tea. But someone has built the house you are in, made sure it keeps the cold out and the warmth in, and provided you with running water for the tea. This someone is most likely an engineer. Engineers are responsible for just about everything we take for granted in the world around us, from tall buildings, tunnels and football stadiums, to access to clean drinking water. They also design and build vehicles, aircraft, boats and ships. What's more, engineers help to develop things which are important for the future, such as generating energy from the sun, wind or waves. Maths is involved in everything an engineer does, whether it is working out how much concrete is needed to build a bridge, or determining the amount of solar energy necessary to power a car.

Money
Once out the door you walk past a newsstand where the headline "house prices boom again" scream from the front pages. House prices are determined by supply and demand, and the one thing anyone buying a house needs is money. Most people get a loan from a bank to buy a house, and then have to pay back the money they borrowed plus some interest and fees. To choose which bank to borrow from, and to decide if you can afford to borrow at all, you need to understand compound interest.
The housing market is part of the bigger economic picture. How the economy is doing affects how much things cost, how much we are paid and how much the government spends - and maths is used to monitor the economy and predict how it will change. A large part of the world's economy is invested in the stock market, and highly skilled mathematicians are employed to try to understand, and even predict, movements in the stock market.

Planning
Whether you are managing money (trying to save for a gap-year holiday), resources (trying to make those Easter eggs last) or time (deciding how much time to spend on studying for each subject), you are doing calculations, sometimes automatically in your head, trying to optimise your outputs (money saved, grades achieved) given your inputs (pay from part-time job, hours in the day). In industry this is called operational research, and is used to improve the processes used in manufacturing, in how businesses are run, and in making the best use of resources such as beds in a hospital or police on the beat.