PART III

APPLICATIONS

WE have attempted to give a useful but greatly oversimplified division of the various areas of application of mathematics into the physical, biological, social, and behavioral sciences. Of course, many disciplines are hybrids, developed from a combination of these sciences—for example, biochemistry which is a hybrid of the biological and physical disciplines. This suggests using the following table or rectangular array to classify applications. We have mentioned only a small number of the existing hybrid areas; some of them may fall in a square that is different from the one the reader thinks appropriate. In the four chapters of this part of the book, we give applications in both the basic and hybrid areas shown.

The following chart is NOT symmetric since we adopt the convention that rows dominate columns; that is, genetics is more biological than physical, while biomedical engineering is more physical than biological.

The next three chapters are concerned with the physical and biological, social and behavioral sciences, and with decision problems.