Words

When people think about mathematics they probably first think of numbers and not words. But mathematics, with its great intellectual curiosity for ideas, studies words from many points of view-doing what it often does, looking for patterns. In fact, the "science" of patterns is sometimes offered as a succinct definition for the subject matter of mathematics as a whole.

If a browser is "fed" a string of words, it "returns" a list of prioritized web items tailored to that string. how is this feat accomplished? It might be that someone designing software to check if a particular essay has been plagiarized might turn to mathematics for assistance. words interest molecular biologists who see the genetics of different species "spelled" out using the letters c, a, t, g which constitute the dna alphabet. one goal is to determine genes in contrast to other dna, although some dna in the past sometimes referred to as junk dna is now known to have biological functions. If one had insights into "words" as objects onto themselves, perhaps it might help with getting insights into these situations. here I will take a brief look at some of the ways mathematics has looked at words in the hope of exploiting the resulting ideas.