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Gajbhiye, Class-IX th A
R.S. Mundle English School, Wardha Road, Nagpur
The health and welfare of Earth relies in large part on the ability to
accurately understand and interpret mathematical environmental data in
critical areas, such as pollution, global warming, recycling, population
growth, and weather predicting. Mathematics plays the Key Role in
analyzing and interpreting environmental data.
Mathematics plays the key role to deal with uncertainty in making environmental
decisions, focusing on some of the interlocking environmental problems of today:
(1) Global Warming;
(2) Biodiversity and Genetic diversity (loss of species);
and
(3)Impending losses of resources (land, energy, clean air, water).
Galileo :
"Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean universe which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which
cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend
the language in which it is written. It is written in the
language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles and other geometric figures, without which it is
humanly impossible to understand a single word of it;
without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth."
Some people claim that the discoveries made by scientists contribute to the
destruction of the natural environment. Professor Louis Gross at the
University of Tennessee shows that the case can equally be made for the
opposite. He is a mathematical ecologist, applying advanced mathematics to
the problems of managing the natural environment to maximise the benefits
to the whole natural system. The pressures of human life have an effect on the
rest of nature and by understanding how the relationships work, everyone and
everything might get some of what they want.
It turns out that these problems are not trivial mathematically. The flow
pattern of a river might have a linear relationship with the rainfall in a
particular place, but what happens when the river bursts its banks? Or if it
rains after a period of drought? And how do you know what the rainfall is
going to be anyway?
Not only are many natural processes essentially stochastic they also require
nonlinear algebra to describe them. Getting meaningful results is a huge
mathematical and computational exercise. This is why Gross, like many
scientists from other, more conventional fields, has turned his attention to the
mathematics of the natural world it has some of the most interesting
mathematical problems. Mathematical biology has achieved a high profile
through cell biology and genomics, but at the scale of the whole ecosystem it is
still in its emerging stage and the field has many opportunities to do new
things.