• Question: do you have to be good at maths to be a scientist?

    Asked by jammy453 to Tom, Matt, Hugh, Douglas, Antonia on 18 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Matthew Hurley

      Matthew Hurley answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      It helps – to work out if the result you get from an experiment is significant you have to do some statistics to work out if what you have found happened by chance or because of the experiment itself. This isn’t too difficult though (and there are lots of computer programs to help!).

    • Photo: Antonia Hamilton

      Antonia Hamilton answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      you can do science without too much maths, but I think the best scientists tend to be good at maths too. I try to only hire people who have A-level maths.

    • Photo: Hugh Roderick

      Hugh Roderick answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      You don’t have to be very good at maths but you need a firm grasp of the basics – as you do for most jobs, so make sure you pay attention in your maths lessons! For more complex maths and statistics that we do use there are computer programs that do the hard part for us, but it’s always good to understand what it is the programe is doing so that you can understand the answers the programe is giving.

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