Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Maths is all around us.
It’s almost impossible to think of something that isn’t made without the help of mathematics.
Buildings, transport, technology, medicine - even clothes and food…
…all rely on numbers, measurements and sums.
High in the sky, maths is at work keeping thousands of aircraft up in the air.
But how can a heavy airplane fly when anything thrown up comes straight back down?
Early pioneers of flying tried tying wings to their arms,
or even putting wings on a bicycle… … but it wasn’t until 1903 that
brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered flight.
With the help of maths, they learnt about the forces - drag, thrust, lift and weight -
that allow a plane to fly.
The same basic principles are used today,
even for our huge planes weighing thousands of kilograms.
Engines move the plane forwards, wings move it upwards.
In a jet engine, air is pulled in to the middle of the engine, is heated up and goes faster,
and bursts out the back, just like a balloon that flies away when you let go of it.
Thanks to Newton’s Laws, we know this creates thrust - the force that moves the plane forward -
and its opposite: drag. During take-off the thrust is greater than
the drag, which, helped by the shape of the wings, causes the plane to lift.
Most wings have an airfoil shape and flaps that help the plane overcome gravity by changing
the pressure of the air above and below the wing.
The amount of lift needed is worked out using maths.
The wings send the air down in a spinning vortex shape, like a mini-tornado.
This balances its weight.
Flying at a steady speed, the thrust exactly balances the drag and the lift exactly balances the weight.
Some planes create lift using propellers, which are like spinning wings, turned by an engine.
And helicopters just have rotors, like wings on top.
The engine spins them fast enough to create the lift to overcome the weight of the helicopter
and fly straight up.
Thanks to the help of maths there are now up to 13,000 aircraft flying in the world on any day…
…proving again that maths really is all around us.