Math Will Rock Your World

BusinessWeek is running an article in this week's issue that contends Math Will Rock Your World. The revolution is happening, and a handful of really smart people are at the forefront of translating everything into numbers around the world. This is nothing new -- it has been happening for some time. Starting first in science and engineering, jumping to businesses via finance, and from there, moving into IT, where mathematics promised to make sense of the vast amount of data businesses had been collecting in their data warehouses. More recently, mathematics has entered the process intensive fields of manufacturing, supply chain management and slowly, into marketing. More and more, mathematics is being used to make sense of non-numerical data -- or data not easily reducible to numbers. Algebra and geometry are finding new applications in proprietary algorithms to help bring intelligence to advertising, biology, and just about every aspect of your new digital life -- especially since there's no end of data being gathered on your behaviour. Of course there is cause to be concerned. Think of all the invasion of privacy issues. Do you want to be dissected and predicted in so many ways? Especially if the accuracy just isn't there. The potential dangers have of course, never stopped the world, so expect that the course will be stayed as long as the promises continue to be made and the benefits of the horizon remain enormous. The pitfalls are many -- but so are the potential benefits.