1 - What is Mathematical Modeling?

Nature reveals itself to us through interactions. We can tell from observations that it is nature’s interactions that lead to its evolution. How nature is changing and predicting how it will change in the future is the work of science. In this work, we observe nature and its interactions to make models of those observations. We aim to predict and explain our observations of nature through this building of models.

In physics, our goals are typically to explain and predict observations of physical phenomenon. Here, we focus ourselves to those canonical things that physicists concern themselves with: motion, fields, waves, atoms, nuclei, and so on.