Question: how much maths is involved in your job?

Edward Taylor answered on 19 Mar 2013:

There is quite a lot of maths involved in my job. You wouldn’t think it, but Maths even has to be used to define all my tests! Even the sand test, statistics are used to define how big the grains of sand should be and how many of them should be that size! The tests are extremely specific. Maths is also used to work out how long we need to test things.

What we do, is tell our customer that the equipment will survive for maybe 10000 hours of use in total. We then do some maths to work out how many hours we need to test our equipment to prove it would live for 10000 hours. By doing that, we don’t actually have to test it for 10000 hours!

When I get to design things, maths is involved then too! We use some hand calculations, but mostly mathematical modelling programs, to try and estimate how much force a component would be about to take before it breaks.

You get used to the maths though, I don’t mind it at all, and it isnt like exams, you can always look up stuff if you aren’t sure! (I always forget equations).