Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Julia and I'm going to talk about the relationship between math and science subjects, which is important because often when you're learning something new in math, you're thinking how does this apply to anything? Why am I learning this? And then science steps in and shows you that it does have a practical application. My favorite science is physics. So, I'm going to give you an example in physics how math is helpful. Well it's incredibly helpful. First of all, math is the language of physics. Let's just keep this to one example. So let's say we're keeping track of some moving object like a car. We are keeping track of the time it's been traveling, and the distance it travels. What you'll often do is you'll plot this on Cartesian coordinates. So, let's draw up some of those. We've got our x axis. We've got a y axis. On the y we're going to put distance. On the x axis, is the time that we've been recording. Now remember that the x variable is the independent variable. And traditionally we always put time on the x axis, because time independently moves forward of everything, right? Time just plods forward whether we want it to or not. Whereas the distance does rely on how long something has been traveling. So distance is dependent, time is independent. So let's say we got some data points that look like this. All right. And we can connect them. They seem to be traveling in a line. My line is a little wavy, but it's a line. There we go. Now what's fun about this is you remember that or maybe you don't, in lines, in graphing lines, we often have to find the slope. The slope of a line is found by calculating the change in y over your change in x. Now in this case, the change in our y correlates to the change in distance and our change in x correlates to the change in time. Change in time over change in distance. I mean change in distance over change in time is something you're familiar with. It would be velocity. Which we mark as a V. So when you're plotting points on your Cartesian coordinates, and you find that slope. The slope of this line translates to the velocity that the object is moving. And there you have it. Everything you learned in your Cartesian math has been helpful and you can use it in physics to track moving objects. I'm Julia. Thank you.