Matematik adalah nukleus kepada sains hakiki, kata sarjana pelawat

• Main Author: Universiti Putra Malaysia, Bahagian Komunikasi Korporat
• Format: UPM News
• Language: English; Malay
• Published: Universiti Putra Malaysia 2013
• Online Access: http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/21741/1/Matematik_adalah_nukleus_kepada_sains_hakiki%2C_kata_sarjana_pelawat.pdf; http://psasir.upm.edu.my/id/eprint/21741/; http://www.upm.edu.my/berita/details/matematiknuklearbm

SERDANG, 17 April (UPM) – Mathematics is like the nucleus for the other “hard” sciences to revolve, says a visiting don from the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Prof Emeritus John Butcher said the traditional “hard” sciences, physics and chemistry, had always depended on mathematics. “Engineering, which is the utilitarian counterpart of the traditional sciences, also uses mathematics in all aspects of what it does,” he said in a public lecture here today. His talk is specially tailored for a group of visiting secondary school students to Universiti Putra Malaysia (UPM). Prof Butcher, who is a visiting professor at the Laboratory of Computational Sciences and Mathematical Physics of the Institute of Mathematical Research (INSPEM) of UPM, said increasingly mathematics was also becoming essential for an understanding of the social and biological sciences as well as finance and business. “But behind these applications, new mathematics is being discovered all the time,” he said in his talk on “Why mathematicians count.” Prof Butcher, 80, obtained his Bachelor degree in mathematics from the Auckland University College before earning his PhD in Physics from the University of Sydney, is a mathematician specialising in numerical methods to solve differential equations.