Inspired!

I receive the university magazine Oxford Today every term but I always just keep the magazines in a drawer "to read later". In the latest Hillary update, I happened to flip open to read. And guess what? My eyes were caught by a familiar name: Prof Philip Maini.

Hey that's my fav tutor! So I proceeded to read the article, extracts below:

Extracts from "Mathematicians come to life":

From his base in Little Clarendon Street, Professor Philip Maini seeks to understand how cancer cells grow and how wounds heal. In the same building his colleague Professor Jon Chapman is studying the role that calcium plays in living cells and trying to get more useful information out of the mammograms used to screen for breast cancer. It sounds like everyday life in a top-notch biological sciences centre - but it's not. Both professors are mathematicians who are using theis mathematical skills to help in tackling some of the most challenging problems in biology.

"One of the intriguing things about mathematics", says Professor Chapman, "is the way in which equations that model one type of things can often be adaoted to model another. For example, it's the equations used by engineers to model the stresses and strains in buildings that are providing the springboard for some of my biological work on modelling human tissue." Maini agrees: "The power of mathematics is that similar mathematical equations can be applied to very, very different areas."

A mathematical model seeks to provide a description of a system that may appear quite complicated - the financial markets are a case in point - in a manner that's simple enough to reveal how the underlying variables interact.

As a mathematician, Professor Maini is excited by the way that biology raises questions that present the new mathematical challenges and encourage a step into the unknown. "In biology you have to deal with what you are given - and it's become obvious that the mathemtaical techniques we have now just don't provide enough insight to solve many current biological problems," he explains. "Clearly we need to develop a new mathematics to provide the necessary insight into biological processes. And the really exciting thing is that nobody yet knows what that is."

As I read the thing, I felt so inspired to do maths again! :) Cos I like the bio side of maths, relates more to people I guess, not to mention the potential of learning something totally amazing! Ah, mf, dream on..