J Madhusudana Rao
Articles written in Resonance – Journal of Science Education
Volume 21 Issue 12 December 2016 pp 1135-1149 Classroom
Tables Turned: Physics in the Service of Mathematics
J Madhusudana Rao T V N Prasanna
E T Bell, the famous author of ‘Men of Mathematics’, hasdescribed mathematics as the ‘Queen of Arts and Servant ofScience’. What he meant is that mathematics serves scienceby entering into the picture as soon as a proper mathematicalmodel is set up by the scientist, and then after a purely mathematicalanalysis of the model, the final mathematical step isinterpreted scientifically. The purpose of the present articleis to convince the readers that sometimes the roles of scienceand mathematics are reversed, and a mathematical problemis interpreted as a physics problem; the laws of physics areutilized for a physical analysis, and the final result of thephysical analysis is interpreted mathematically. We shall illustratethis by means of few examples.
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