On this week's broadcast we discussed many ways in which mathematics is used in the study of the movement of water in the ocean. It turns out that this is a pretty complicated issue. There are partial differential equations that are used to describe fluid flow, but solutions to these equations have been elusive thus far. Computers are used to estimate approximate solutions with research continually done to improve the results.
We also talked about how water waves resemble the graph of the sine function from trigonometry. A more accurate model is a "trochoid," the path formed by a point on a wheel as the wheel rolls along the ground. Both the sine graph and trochoids are based on circular motion which isn't too much of a surprise since ocean water actually moves in small circles as the shape of a wave moves across the surface.
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