Mathematics in Society: An Introduction
In this short introduction, the section “Mathematics in Society” of the Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences is discussed.
- PDF / 159,863 Bytes
- 2 Pages / 439.36 x 666.15 pts Page_size
- 84 Downloads / 266 Views
Abstract In this short introduction, the section “Mathematics in Society” of the Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences is discussed.
Keywords Mathematics in society
Mathematics in society is usually associated with contexts in which mathematical models are needed for predictive purposes or historically with design in the domain of engineering. With the advent of the Covid19 pandemic, mathematical models and modeling have come to the forefront of public consciousness and the discourse of policy makers. In fact, we already live in a world inundated by data. Algorithms that form the basis of artificial intelligence (AI) intertwine with the lives of more and more people in the form of apps on handheld devices like smartphones or even watches synchronized with their smartphones. Information technology has allowed one to record the minutiae of the daily grind – How many steps has one taken in a day? How many calories has one consumed in a day? What is the resting heart rate, blood pressure, and other health vitals? Biohacking is a new trend to maximize longevity. The synchronicity of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) with apps can reproduce the exact location and routes taken by a person each day, which stand in sharp contrast to how position was calculated by sailors at sea using the stars and later the sextant. Things take on a “Huxleyian” tenor when surveillance and other biometric
B. Sriraman () Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 B. Sriraman (ed.), Handbook of the Mathematics of the Arts and Sciences, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70658-0_141-1
1
2
B. Sriraman
recognition technologies continually harvest data that can create a digital footprint of a person’s movement. Coupled with these strictly “physical” co-ordinates of data lies a deeper web of communication, transactions that occur on a daily basis with information seeking and sharing – which are richer sources of data that are harvested for analysis of browsing habits, shopping/spending habits, texting habits, social habits, patterns of speech, etc. In fact, human (generated) data in the virtual world of the internet has already been commodified in the form of “futures” – bought and sold in the stock market like agricultural and mining futures once were! As opposed to Calculus and Differential Equations which formed the backbone of engineering applications relevant for society – such as roads being twice differentiable curves, bridges and planes meeting safety thresholds, etc., concepts from linear algebra, stochastics, probability, and statistics coupled with computer programming form the theoretical basis of data science, and machine learning in AI. Today the expression “mathematics in society” is perhaps tautological. To wit, the chapters in this section address both classical and modern connections of mathematics in society, along with some unusual ones. Some chapters address the role of probability in everyday situations
Data Loading...
