Police Mathematics

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Police Mathematics

When you think of math does the word crime ever come to mind? Most likely you were thinking about measurements, properties and numbers. Mathematics is used in the everyday life of humans. Police use mathematics everyday on their job to solve crimes. Policemen jobs are to find out what happened at the sight of the scene of the crime or accident. They use math on the job to explain data that needs to be stored for information.
For example, a speeding car causing skid marks. “Data can be stored and interpreted using wavelets, probability and statistics. It can be securely transmitted using prime numbers and cryptography. But first of all, police must get at the information underlying the data. They must look at all the evidence left at the crime scene and work backwards to deduce what happened and who did it”(Budd1). In order for the officer to find out how fast the car was going at the scene he needs to solve an inverse problem. “Inverse problems are mathematical detective problems. An example of an inverse problem is trying to find the shape of an object only knowing its shadows ”(Budd1). In addition, a day on the job of being a cop. There is a car accident and the officer job is to figure out if the car was speeding or not. The only information the police officer has is the damage to the car, witnesses, and skid marks from the vehicle. By investigating the skid marks can help rebuild the accident. “The marks are caused by the speed of the car as well as other factors such as braking force, friction with the road and impacts with other vehicles”(Budd1). Without any witnesses at the scene of the accident, the police officers have to plug in a formula to figure out who is at fault of the accident. “The formula i...

... middle of paper ...

...ariables x describes the various pixels in the image. h(x) is the pixel value after blurring. Running the formula above backwards will give us the unblurred image given by f (x) from the blurred image h(x). If the police officer doesn’t know this formula there would be no way he could unblur the picture and solve the getaway burglary”(Budd1).
To conclude, police offers use mathematics to gather information to solve crimes. If a police officer didn’t know mathematics it would be hard for them to investigate crimes in our world today. Deblurring license plates, reconstructing accidents, and making mathematic models is the secret weapon for police officers.

Works Cited

http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue37/features/budd/index

http://mathcentral.uregina.ca/beyond/articles/RCMP/traffic.html

http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/military/research/4346435

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