Physics and Mathematics

Graphic - doingmaths
http://www.ph.ed.ac.uk/ pjt/library/lib14a/4a.html http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Prinicipia-title.png

For a physicist, making sense of the world means showing that the ‘model’ accounts for the ‘observations’. This process involves either pen-and-paper mathematics or computer simulation.

Newton developed the methods of calculus (set out in Principia Mathematica, left) for this purpose.

Supercomputers (like this one, right, in the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre) are now routinely used to deal with problems too complex to handle by pen-and-paper mathematics.