Improving the Industrial/Mathematics Interface

Abstract

Mathematics is ubiquitous in the sciences and engineering. Arguably a science is considered to have come of age when it has become sufficiently mathematical as illustrated by the burgeoning areas of mathematical biology and mathematical finance. Despite all the potential applications, some mathematicians have moved away from industry and from real applications. From the late 1960s under the influence of the Oxford group [Alan Tayler and Leslie Fox, see Ockendon (1998), Tayler (1990)], interest in modeling real industrial problems has steadily grown. Industrial mathematics and its near synonyms is problem-driven mathematics for the sake of the sciences while pure mathematics may be regarded as being mathematics for its own sake. In this context ‘industry’ is interpreted in a very broad sense: the remit of these groups includes more than collaboration with industry (problems may come from anywhere in the sciences, e.g. mathematical biology, mathematical finance, the environment).