New Mathematics – Mathematics in the 21st century
Since the beginning of the new century mathematics has become an increasingly complex subject area. This is due to more and more conjunctive and innovative ways of carrying out mathematics.
Mathematics still provides us with models to describe natural phenomena. If there is such a thing as a universal formula to model all fundamental interactions in nature, however, this would certainly not be one single formula but rather some kind of complex mathematical structure.
Not only would it have to confirm empirical data, it would also need to be consistent in a mathematical sense.
Future outlook
In the 21 st century more people will be traveling and more goods will be transported than ever before. Communication and data exchange has been changing considerably. These processes can be described mathematically in order to regulate them as efficiently as possible. Applied mathematics is also used by large companies in strategic decision making that depends on many factors.
Project management can utilize computer-based planning and implementation. The interaction of the most recent technological developments, for example, computer technology and mathematics are paving the way to solving many problems that previously were difficult for humans to solve. One example is the four-color map problem, which became the first mathematical mystery to be solved by computers.
In the middle of the 19th century Francis Guthrie had posed the question of how many colors would be required to color adjacent areas so that they can still be distinguished from each other on any possible map. Humans were not able to establish a proof for this without the use of a computer.
Mathematical models are also applied in microbiology where they describe systems with vast amounts of numbers and relations. For example, models designed for data processing and statistics gave insights into the HIV virus and associated therapy. Another threat to human health is the resistance to drugs. In this area too, mathematical models can be used to help create more effective drugs.
THE GOOGLE ALGORITHM
In recent years Google has established itself as the market leader of Internet search engines. One of the most important reasons, aside from its high performance and user friendliness, is the quality of its search results in comparison to those of other search engines. This is based on a procedure called PageRank.
It is a specialized procedure, which evaluates the link popularity of a page. Link popularity is measured by the number of incoming links for each document or page. In contrast to the previous concept of link popularity, PageRank links the absolute number of incoming links with the corresponding page.