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Asked by meganl56 to Emma, Al, Ivanka, James, Omar on 16 Mar 2012. This question was also asked by padda006.
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Emma Bould answered on 13 Mar 2012:
I don’t use lots of complicated maths very often in my job (which is good I think!) but occasionally I have to remember something I did at school or university.
Thinking about what I use most often….. probably Algebra (rearranging equations is a given!) Fractions, Percentages, Statistics. I also do quite a lot of producing and analysing graphs to help me figure out how my equipment is performing.
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Al Bartlett answered on 16 Mar 2012:
Hello meganl56,
In the aircraft industry, maths is used every day. It may be some measuring or it may be working out how much fuel to put in the aircraft – this is worked out by calculating the weight, the windspeeds, the distance to travel and lots of other figures. It is important to get this right or the aircraft might only get half way to is destination before it has to land – that would be embarrasing!!
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Ivanka Brown answered on 16 Mar 2012:
No I don’t use maths every day. In addition to the technical side, engineering also includes financial, resource, client, quality, environmental and safety management. Once I have used maths to design something, there is the complicated task of communicating my design to everyone without using numbers as most clients are not engineers. Also the people doing the buildings don’t have time to look at the calculation I have produced (however great they are), so everything must be put onto lots of drawings.
We also have to understand how what we are suggesting to build is affected by current laws. For example, if we raise some ground, we need to write letters/talk to the Environment Agency to find out whether we are allowed. This area may be a flood plain and raising the ground in our location will create flooding elsewhere!
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James Vokes answered on 16 Mar 2012:
I use a lot of arrays and matrices which you may or may not have heard of. I’m guessing that you know all the data stored in the computer is stored in 1s and 0s. Well since it’s stored in 1s and 0s we can do cool things to using some maths called Bitwise Operators. Instead of having just + – ÷ x etc. we have new ones that do cool things to binary numbers (numbers only made up of 1s and 0s). I won’t get into how they work but I use some form of them almost everyday.
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Omar Mustufvi answered on 20 Mar 2012:
Most of the maths I do on a daily basis is working with facts and figures, for example what is the top speed of a car, how heavy is it, how much CO2 does it produce per kilometre and also being able to read graphs- lots of meetings involve being presented with data and in order to help find a solution you need to understand what the situation is.
So its quite good to be able to work with numbers and graphs in general, but don’t worry because like everything the more you practice and deal with these things the more natural it becomes.
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