Mathematics and Linguistics

Thinking Mathematically

Short Essay: Understanding Mathematics and Linguistics

How is Mathematics and Linguistics related with each other?

Linguistics is the science of language. Linguists seek to understand the

proper uses of natural human language. How languages are structured, how and

why they vary and change, how they are acquired, and how people, in

communicating use them.

Mathematics on the other hand is the language of science. It is used to

understand areas as diverse as the structure of DNA and the motions of planets.

Mathematics abstracts the fundamental issue at the heart of an example, frequently

finding connections with other, initially contradictory problems.

Language is a universal theory. Everyone uses language as a form of

communication. This is the same in Mathematics. Math, like linguistics can be

broken down into many different sub-categories such as geometry, trigonometry,

algebra, etc. Algebra, being a great example of this because, instead of using words,

it uses symbols to convey an idea.

Forming sentences is like forming an equation. Once the pattern is

understood, a person who speaks this type of language is able to understand. Once

one knows the pattern, it is easy to understand the overall meaning of a language

without even knowing the vocabulary; therefore linguistics like mathematics is a

universal concept.

In my research and study of mathematics and linguistics I discovered how

important and inter-related both subject areas are to each other. Mathematical

linguistics is the study of statistical structure of texts and the construction of

mathematical models of the phonological and grammatical structure of languages.

Today, the fields of linguistics are used by computer scientists, engineers, and by

mathematicians who are interested in the nature of language processing.

To summarize,math deals a lot with patterns, as does linguistics,