Presented By : Mrunank V.

Gajbhiye, Class-IX th A
R.S. Mundle English School, Wardha Road, Nagpur

Mathematics plays a key role in

environmental studies, modelling, etc. Basic
mathematics - calculus, percents, ratios,
graphs and charts, sequences, sampling,
averages, a population growth model,
variability and probability - all relate to
current, critical issues such as pollution, the
availability of resources, environmental cleanup, recycling, chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), and
population growth.

We see a diversity of waves in our everyday experience . Among this a type

of water wave known as the solitary wave found by Korteweg and de Vries
in 1895 are often initiated by mid-ocean earthquakes, but also susceptible
To creation by human error, similar waves propagate across oceans at the
speed of a commercial jet and cause devastation when they collide with
solid shore. The mathematical theory of this water waves helped us to
understand and protect our environment, but its insights have also had a
significant impact on technological development. Although the solitary
wave is now well understood, other water waves still have mysterious
effects on our environment and remain objects of active mathematical
research.

The health and welfare of Earth relies in large part on the ability to
accurately understand and interpret mathematical environmental data in
critical areas, such as pollution, global warming, recycling, population
growth, and weather predicting. Mathematics plays the Key Role in
analyzing and interpreting environmental data.

Mathematics plays the key role to deal with uncertainty in making environmental
decisions, focusing on some of the interlocking environmental problems of today:
(1) Global Warming;
(2) Biodiversity and Genetic diversity (loss of species);
and
(3)Impending losses of resources (land, energy, clean air, water).

Global environmental problems have local and regional causes and

consequences, such as, linkages between photosynthetic dynamics at the
leaf level, regional shifts in forest composition, and global changes in
climate and the distribution of greenhouse gases. The fundamental
problem is relating processes that are operating on very different scales of
space and time. Mathematical methods provide the only way to tackle
such problems.

It was a mathematician, Joseph

Fourier (1768-1830), who coined
the term Greenhouse Effect".
That this term, so commonly
used today to describe human
effects on the global climate,
originated with a mathematician
points to the insights that
mathematics can offer into
environmental problems.
Three articles in the November
2010 issue of the Notices of the
American Mathematical Society
examine ways in which
mathematics can contribute to
understanding environmental
and ecological issues.

Some special characteristics are shared by many mathematical models of

environmental phenomena:
1) the relevant variables (e.g., levels of persistent contamination in a lake) are not
known precisely but evolve over time with some degree of randomness;
2) both the short-term behavior (e.g., day-by-day interaction of toxins in the lake)
and longer-term behavior (cumulative effects of repeated winter freezes) are
important;
and
3) the system is subject to outside influences from human behavior, such as
industrial pollution and environmental regulations.
Concerning the latter characteristic, ideas from a branch of mathematics called
Control Theory, which studies how systems are affected when they are strategically
influenced from the outside. Interventions for environmental problems can
influence ecological systems dramatically but are often neglected in development
planning. Control Theory offers methods for determining an appropriate level of
intervention and for evaluating its effects. For example we should look at the use of
solar panels to run a desalination plant. A model using ideas from Control Theory
can guide optimal use of the plant in the sense of maximizing the expected volume
of fresh water produced.

Galileo :
"Philosophy is written in this grand book - I mean universe which stands continuously open to our gaze, but which
cannot be understood unless one first learns to comprehend
the language in which it is written. It is written in the
language of mathematics, and its characters are triangles,
circles and other geometric figures, without which it is
humanly impossible to understand a single word of it;
without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth."

To save environment we should use Ecotechnology

( =technology that works like nature and works with nature)
and for sophisticated ecotechnology Mathematics will help
better as we need to pay attention to whats already known
permaculture, systems ecology and so on.

Some people claim that the discoveries made by scientists contribute to the
destruction of the natural environment. Professor Louis Gross at the
University of Tennessee shows that the case can equally be made for the
opposite. He is a mathematical ecologist, applying advanced mathematics to
the problems of managing the natural environment to maximise the benefits
to the whole natural system. The pressures of human life have an effect on the
rest of nature and by understanding how the relationships work, everyone and
everything might get some of what they want.
It turns out that these problems are not trivial mathematically. The flow
pattern of a river might have a linear relationship with the rainfall in a
particular place, but what happens when the river bursts its banks? Or if it
rains after a period of drought? And how do you know what the rainfall is
going to be anyway?
Not only are many natural processes essentially stochastic they also require
nonlinear algebra to describe them. Getting meaningful results is a huge
mathematical and computational exercise. This is why Gross, like many
scientists from other, more conventional fields, has turned his attention to the
mathematics of the natural world it has some of the most interesting
mathematical problems. Mathematical biology has achieved a high profile
through cell biology and genomics, but at the scale of the whole ecosystem it is
still in its emerging stage and the field has many opportunities to do new
things.