• Question: how much more effective is expalining your experiment through maths and code compared to words ? and what are the benfits of writing in maths and code ?

    Asked by Lonnie Mac to Jonny on 19 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Jonny Brooks-Bartlett

      Jonny Brooks-Bartlett answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      So maths gives me the numbers that I need to work things out. For example. When I make crystals I need to weigh out a certain amount of salt to mix into water.
      Person 1 doesn’t use maths and tells me that I need more salt.
      Person 2 uses maths and says that I need to add 1 gram of salt.

      Can you see that if I use maths then I get exact answers whereas if I don’t use maths I can only get an idea of “more” or “less”. That’s why all scientists have to use maths.

      Sometimes I have way too many equations to work out and it’s hard to keep track of it on paper, so instead I use computers to do the maths for me and make nice graphs. So I write code that translates my maths into computer language and make the computer do it for me.

      Here is an example of a graph that I let the computer do for me:
      https://github.com/JonnyCBB/StructureFactorCorrelations/blob/master/test/IntensityDiffComp_0-2-0_and_2-2-2.pdf

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