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The article makes this claim: > "Most top chemists and biomedical researchers have little use for mathematics per se, except in terms of using statistical soft
by wobbleblob 11y ago
The article makes this claim:
> "Most top chemists and biomedical researchers have little use for mathematics per se, except in terms of using statistical software or basic calculus. "
Now I never ended up working in the field, but I remember my organic chemistry Msc. being fairly math heavy. Solving the Schroedinger equation for a complex molecule or refining a stochastic simulation model involved a bit more than basic calculus. The whole course was more math than lab work.
Was this article written by someone who never took an advanced science class, or by a mathematician to whom all the math used in natural sciences is trite and simple?
- dnautics 11y agoI think Curious Wavefunction was a practicing chemist. Nobody really solves schroedinger equations (actually you can't really solve it for anything besides hydrogen) and first-pass "gut" understanding of kinetics is usually good enough to get most things done. As for kinetics: in practice, just do it five times at five temperatures to find the best yield where it goes fast and doesn't degrade. This would be for organic synthesis. Biochemists use kinetics more, one time my boss yelled at her grad students for using 1 uL pipettes because they have poor resolution for kinetic studies, but even so they're not necessary for many studies (for example, for my biochemistry pretty much everything was pushed to the saturating rate and we had linear kinetics).