• Question: What was the most inspiring thing maths has done for you? – Coming from a student who hasn’t found the inspiration yet

    Asked by secretsaudience27 on 31 Dec 2019.
    • Photo: Diana Kornbrot

      Diana Kornbrot answered on 31 Dec 2019:

      There is always a new challenge and I like solving reasoning problems.
      What DOES give you inspiration? If I knew that moight be able to relate it to maths

    • Photo: Gary Munnelly

      Gary Munnelly answered on 1 Jan 2020:

      Diagnosing patients in hospitals with diseases and then suggesting ways to cure them.

      Medical diagnosis and treatment is essentially a process of taking as input a number of variables from a patient (age, weight, symptoms, gender etc.), checking these inputs against a probability function, and then outputting the most probable diagnosis. Suggesting a course of treatment can be done the same way using the most probable diagnosis as one of the inputs.

      I’m simplifying a little, and there is a slew of ethical considerations that have to be weighed before you automate the treatment of patients, but the idea that maths can help to save lives is one of the most inspiring things for me.

      I was actually lucky enough to work on a project that did this waaaay back in 2012. As far as I know it was ultimately deployed in a few G.P. practices, but I had left the project by that stage to do my PhD.

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