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Asked by maciej to Alison, Artem, Caroline, John, Gunther on 19 Jun 2012.
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Artem Evdokimov answered on 19 Jun 2012:
This is a very difficult question, primarily because the definition of ‘useful’ and ‘important’ varies from person to person, and from scientist to scientist. There are some universally important subjects out there, of which mathematics, especially applied math such as logic, statistics, linear algebra, and so on is perhaps the in the top rank. Without mathematics none of the other sciences would make any headway with any of their experiments because logic and statistics give us the foundation for deriving meaning from experimental data. So my vote is for mathematics.
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Alison Graham answered on 19 Jun 2012:
All of these sciences rely on each other to some extent so it’s difficult to pick one out as being the most important. I am a biologist but I have been involved in research projects with chemists, physicists, computer scientists and mathematicians. Although these are the three science subjects we study at school, when you get to university level and beyond the boundaries between them get more fuzzy. These days, you could get a job as a computational biologist or a medical physicist.
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Caroline Dalton answered on 19 Jun 2012:
This is a very tricky one and as Alison says, the boundaries between them can get quite blurred! For example a biologist might be doing a very useful and important experiment but it is only the physics principles used to make a confocal microscope or the maths used to analyse the data that allows that experiment to be carried out and something meaningful and useful to be learned from it!
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John Short answered on 22 Jun 2012:
They are a holy trinity, you cannot have one without the others in our lives.
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