Do you want to become a doctor? Did you know that students who major in mathematics have one of the highest acceptance rates into medical school? In fact, acceptance rates for mathematics students over the last 4 years have averaged 6% higher than for students who majored in biological sciences and 38% higher than for students who majored in health or exercise sciences.

"In the past, one could get by on intuition and experience. Times have changed. Today, the name of the game is data." — Steven D. Levitt, co-author of Freakonomics

More and more, math is an essential tool to survive in today’s world.  Math is a powerful tool for understanding the world, and almost everyone—from advertising agencies to doctors, from retailers to builders—everyone who doesn’t want to be left behind is using math to do their job better and to get ahead in the world.

“The world is moving into a new age of numbers. …Just look at where the mathematicians are now. They’re helping to map out advertising campaigns, they’re changing the nature of research in newsrooms and in biology labs, and they’re enabling marketers to forge new one-on-one relationships with customers. As this occurs, more of the economy falls into the realm of numbers.”  Business Week, Math will Rock Your World, January 23, 2006

The formulas and ideas you learn in math are very useful, but even if you never use them again, learning math develops critical thinking and problem-solving skills—it makes you smarter. 

Your body gets stronger when you exercise it by running, lifting weights, and jumping rope.  Your mind gets stronger when you do math—solving problems, understanding new ideas, and proving theorems.  Most athletes don’t lift weights in competition, but having stronger muscles helps you in all your sports.   Most people don’t do advanced math for their work, but being smarter helps you in everything you do.

• Math helps you learn how to solve the hard challenges in your life that no one has solved before. 
• Math helps you learn to recognize mistakes in thinking and errors in arguments—it helps you recognize when people are lying to you or trying to cheat you. 
• Math helps you handle data.  The world is filled with more and more numbers, patterns, and data.  Math gives you the important tools you need to deal with it all, make sense of it, and use it in your life.

I talk to a lot of people who think that math is just a string of formulas, equations, and rules that someone just made up.   They think that if you want to be good at math, you should memorize all the formulas and follow all the rules, just the way the teacher tells you, and then you get an “A.”   Boring!  No wonder so many people ask, “When will I ever use this math?”

Luckily math is not just about memorizing formulas and rules.  It is about solving new problems and thinking about the world in deep ways.  It is about seeing what different things have in common and how to use what you learned on one problem to solve something that looks completely different.

As a teacher, I know a lot of the technical application of the math I teach, but I don’t always have a good, clear answer for my students who want to know “When will I ever use math?”  So the BYU Math Department has started this webpage in order to help people—students, teachers, parents, and everyone else—see some of the many ways that math matters in real life.

Math helps with more in life than just saving money on your car insurance.  All the theories, procedures, formulas and rules you learn in math help you better understand how the world works, why things are the way they are, and how to change things.  It is a key tool for science, engineering, and management.  That means math is important if you want to make anything better, faster, or cheaper.  In fact, lots of the careers described on this site include people who spend all their time using math to make things better, faster, and cheaper.

In addition to the formulas and rules being useful, learning math is valuable because it develops critical thinking and problem-solving skills—it makes you smarter.  Your body gets stronger when you exercise it by running, lifting weights, and jumping rope.  Your mind gets stronger when you do math—solving problems, understanding new ideas, and proving theorems.  Most athletes don’t lift weights in competition, but having stronger muscles helps you in all your sports.   Most people don’t do advanced math for their work, but being smarter helps you in everything you do.

On this website you will find mathematical careers, salaries, and job requirements, but you will also find tips and advice on how to succeed in mathematics, introductions to new mathematical discoveries, and even tidbits on the role math plays in pop-culture. We also have some resources for teachers, parents, and others who want to help people appreciate mathematics.  

Finally, we have created some posters, sweat bands, t-shirts, and other materials about math.  Most of my students like these just because of the way they look, but teachers can also use them to advertise the many exciting opportunities in mathematics.  These are available on this site under the “Resources for teachers” tab.

I hope you like the site.   And always remember, the more math you know, the more options you have!

Tyler Jarvis, Chair
BYU Department of Mathematics

THE UNKOWN VARIABLES OF HEALING
(from the Spring 2002 issue of BYU Magazine)

By Lisa Ann Jackson, ’97

A BYU math professor is using complex equations to help solve the problem of scarring.

A BYU math professor envisions a world with no scars. Burns, scrapes, gashes, and slices would heal without mark or lasting tissue damage. Blemishes would be prevented with the rub of an ointment.

Admittedly, John C. Dallon, assistant professor of mathematics, is years away from realizing his dream. Maybe even a lifetime. But he is laying the theoretical foundation to help lab researchers zero in on the cause and cure of scarring.

In the early 1980s there was a resurgence of interest in wound healing and scarring. After surgeons performed the first in utero operations, an unexpected discovery was that the infants treated as fetuses had no scars from the surgery.

Working in the relatively new field of math biology, Dallon has developed equations that model the cell-level interactions taking place as a wound heals. His research suggests that biologists may have the right chemical but the wrong interaction.

Results of his ongoing wound-healing studies have recently been published in the journal Wound Repair and Regeneration and are turning the heads of mathematicians and biologists alike.

Dallon began his research by studying what biologists had already discovered about the process of scarring. When it was discovered that fetuses didn’t scar, biologists naturally started looking for differences in the ways adult wounds and infant wounds heal. They narrowed it down to a chemical called Transforming Growth Factor-beta (TGF-b), a substance present in adult wounds but not in fetal wounds.

The next step for biologists was to remove TGF-b to see if it reduced scarring, and in experiments it has. "As clinicians, this is exactly what they want to know. They want to know what to do to reduce scarring, " says Dallon. "But as a theoretician, I want to know what’s going on."

So Dallon decided to focus on the differences between normal tissue and scar tissue. Normal tissue fiber is randomly aligned, creating a basket weave–like affect. Scar tissue, however, aligns in a more parallel fashion, making it stand out from the normal tissue around it.

Using what biologists have already discovered about the molecular process that causes scar-tissue alignment and combining it with existing equations, Dallon was able to create mathematical models of the processes taking place in a wound.

His simulations, however, are not consistent with the hypothesis that removing TGF-b from a wound will produce less alignment of the tissue and therefore less scarring. In fact, his models suggest that reducing TGF-b may actually produce more alignment and, therefore, more scarring. In addition, further simulations reveal that recently discovered effects of one type of TGF-b not found in skin cells may be integral to the random alignment of normal tissue fibers.

"The known effects biologists are looking at do not explain this phenomenon—that by removing TGF-b you get less scarring, " Dallon concludes.

Burgeoning Field

Convincing biologists of his conclusions isn’t easy. Although math has been used for decades to study biology, the field of math biology is still gaining recognition.

"It’s something that has been done in physics for a long time, " Dallon says of combining math and science. "And I think biologists are going to have to resort to using much more math than they have in the past."

Some biology disciplines already rely on mathematical modeling. Ecological studies of fish populations, for instance, are typically simulated mathematically, and cancer researchers are also turning to mathematical models.

"There’s an increasing awareness among medical scientists about math biology, " says Jonathan Sherratt, professor of math at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, and Dallon’s coresearcher. But Sherratt says that if you asked the average biologist on the street about math biology, you might still get a blank stare.

Dallon’s work has been well received at conferences and in journals, but there is still a common thread among biologists’ responses: "They say it is way too simplistic, " Dallon says.

"The biological process is extremely complicated, " Dallon concedes. "Biologists are right when they say, ‘You are simplifying it so much. How can we believe anything you say?’ To which I say, ‘You can believe some of what I am saying.’"

Not that Dallon’s equations are only half right; rather, they are intentionally stripped down. His goal as a mathematician is to reduce a system to its simplest form and then add complicating variables back into the equations as he learns from the simpler ones.

For example, an initial equation may involve just collagen (a protein found in skin) and fibroblasts (cells that produce collagen). As he manipulates the equation, he is able to gain insight into how these two elements interact. Then he can add other elements to the mix, complicating the equation and interaction.

"Then I can put all these effects together, which I hope will model the real situation, " Dallon says.

Zeroing In

Simplifying interactions allows researchers to produce situations biologists cannot create themselves.

"I can change how much collagen is produced and do just that one thing, " says Dallon. "It is much easier to manipulate a mathematical model than it is to manipulate the real system. It takes biologists years to do these sorts of experiments. And in the real system, if you want the wound to heal, you can’t eliminate everything."

The promise of mathematical modeling is drawing more attention to math biology. Speaking specifically about Dallon’s work with TGF-b, William J. Linbald, editor-in-chief of Wound Repair and Regeneration, notes that these studies are difficult to perform in organic settings. "Unfortunately, it is very difficult to do these types of studies in vivo. A mathematical model that would correctly predict the effect of different TGF-beta profiles on scar formation would be extremely informative."

The models provide an element of navigation not commonly available to biologists. They are able to hone their experiments to the areas pinpointed by the models.

As Dallon and colleagues blend known biological processes with known equations, at points along the way the analogy breaks down and they have to adjust the model. "We’re refining the model and making it more realistic, " Sherratt says. "There is obviously a lot more to be done. It’s ongoing."

The Real World

So the question remains, when someone scrapes a knee or undergoes surgery, will Dallon’s equations help him avoid the resultant scar? That’s the ultimate goal. But Dallon is, admittedly, a few steps removed from a real-world application. Pharmaceutical companies can’t bottle Dallon’s equations, but Dallon hopes to point biologists in the right direction so they can get to the treatment-development stage faster.

"Eventually this will lead to developing anti-scarring therapy, " says Sherratt. "That’s the big picture of what we’re doing."

http://magazine.byu.edu/?act=view&a=980