In a sense, the software industry was born on 23rd June 1969 when IBM announced that it would ”unbundle” its software and sell it as a product. Now software is everywhere. It’s in your phone, car and probably even in one of your credit cards. Don’t be surprised if it’s in your doorknob next year. Software has clearly had quite a ride.
Now mathematics is out to make a similar journey (riding on software in many cases). It escaped the confines of physics in the mid-80s and first conquered Wall Street. If you use Google News then you know that maths and algorithms even made a dent on news. Last year BusinessWeek had a nice cover story, Math Will Rock Your World, that talks about all this.
What reminded me about this is an article in this week’s Economist about medical statistics. It tells a story about how Dr. Peter Austin looked at patient data from an Ontario hospital and applied the traditional medical analysis to show that…
PEOPLE born under the astrological sign of Leo are 15% more likely to be admitted to hospital with gastric bleeding than those born under the other 11 signs. Sagittarians are 38% more likely than others to land up there because of a broken arm.
Obviously this is hogwash. He wanted to show how amateurish is the state of practice in the medical community when it comes to doing proper statistical analysis. No wonder one medical study shows that coffee is good for you and another declares it to be evil. What’s the answer? Send mathematics to the rescue!
Sharad,
I do not have high hopes for Mathematics (of the statistical analysis variety) improving state of practise in Medicine or Social sciences by an order of magnitude. There are just way too many variables - some known, many unknown - to have a controlled study. The techniques are around for decades and we have very little confidence in the stability of these studies. What is determined as statistically significant for one set of population, under one set of circumstances, is difficult to extrapolate to population at large. Co-relations are notoriously fickle and tell more about the experimenters’ bias. You find what you seek.
What is needed is understanding of the cause-and-effect relationships. This is where the DNA sequencing, gene analysis etc. comes in and this is where, IMO, mathematics is going to make huge impact.
Regards,
Ravi
Good point, Ravi. I agree that the real impact of mathematics will be in the early drug discovery stage.