The theme for the year 2001 was "Mathematics and the Ocean". Click here for the official Mathematics Awareness Month site .

Why do we study the ocean?

• To learn about the weekly weather and long term climate change.

  Should airlines cancel flights because of forecasted snow? Is there global warming? The difference in air and sea pressure and temperature, waves and surface winds, all effect weather and climate. For example, recent advances in monitoring ocean temperature along the equator in the Pacific ocean have lead to a better understanding of El niño and La niña.

• To learn about the effects of pollution.

  In addition to the occasional oil spill, the ocean is used as a dumping ground. Pollutants on land are also transported to the ocean by rivers, and ground water. Where does this pollution go? To a beach near you?

• To aid fisherman, the transport of goods, and understand our coasts.

  Many large cities (Beijing, London, and New York, for example) are not just coincidentally located on coasts. How do the tides on beaches behave? How will tourism be effected?

What areas of math help our understanding of the ocean?

• Partial differential equations. Specifically, the Navier-Stokes equations, and variants of it, describe the dynamic process between pressure, temperature and velocity in the ocean. There is a lot of work to be done in this area. Even though people use computers to solve the equations (see below), no one has proved that a reasonable solution exists! You can win a million dollars if you can prove it, see Clay Mathematics Institute of Cambridge MA .

• Numerical Analysis. No exact solution of the Navier-Stokes equation is known, so approximate solutions are found on computers. Numerical Analysis helps estimate how good these solutions are, and what are the best algorithms.

• Statistics. Thousands of pieces of data are collected each day about the ocean. Visit the World Ocean Circulation Experiment to find links to different kinds of data. Statistics can help us analyze it all.

• Dynamical Systems theory, helps us understand the transport of particles by the ocean. Think about a float in the ocean, what path does it take?

• Inverse theory or data assimilation, uses both data and partial differential equations. It helps answer questions like: How efficient are our observing systems? How accurate are our models? See this link at Oregon State University for more information.

This is to give you an idea of why using math to study the ocean in important, and is by no means exhaustive. An interesting and detailed essay was written about mathematics and the ocean for mathematics awareness month 2001.