Is Big Data Enough? A Reflection on the Changing Role of Mathematics in Applications

he advent of computers, and especially high-performance computers, has had a dramatic impact on the way in which mathematics is done and even more on how mathematics is applied, as demonstrated by the growth of computational mathematics as well as what goes under the name of “experimental mathematics”, to which a journal is now devoted. More importantly, computers are now used to perform highly complex computations in order to apply mathematical models to a variety of empirical problems that could never be attacked otherwise. It is in this way that mathematics is often applied in different branches of biology (think of genomics and proteomics) as well as t