Why maths ?

Introduction

Task

Process

Resources

Evaluation

Conclusion

Credits

You now have done a lot of math's. But the title of this WebQuest is "Why maths ?". Have you answered this question for yourself yet ?

As I said in the introduction, this WebQuest wanted to show that you need maths where you wouldn't expect it. I hope this is now clear to you, as the task description didn't really indicate that this task is to be a difficult mathematical task. However, we could solve it very well with maths. Similarly this WebQuest could have given a task with a biologic, chemical, physical or business background, although the description doesn't refer to maths, you would need a lot of mathematical knowledge to solve it.

If you are coming from a computer scientist background, you now could say : "Yes, but it would be much easier to just write a small computer program and solve the task of this WebQuest". Maybe. But a real mathematician would be able to solve this task within two ours, maybe one. And this without any! tool except pen and paper. So it couldn't be much faster if you programmed a solution for this problem. And surely, there are similar problems, where you don't even know how a computer could help you to solve this problem until you understand the mathematical ways how you can solve it.

In addition, sometimes it is nice if you can prove, that what the computer calculates is correct. In the case of the WEMI Task here, you could spend two weeks to multiply the matrix with itself over and over again to prove the result (and assumedly you would make 1000 mistakes, so you wouldn't prove anything at all). Whereas with the example solution here you can check your computer within some hours.

And last but not least you have seen what computer scientists at the university of Karlsruhe, Germany do most of their time in their first two years.