Real-Life Math -- Solution
Dr. W. F. Rowe of George Washington University says a DNA analyst
uses fairly simple math on the job. The most common math problem is doing
basic statistics -- or finding the answers to questions like: What's the likelihood
this individual left the stain?
The other area where math is used is
when trying to figure out what happened at a crime scene. This is what you
are trying to do.
You have a blood spatter that is 10 mm wide and 39
mm high. By dividing the width by the height and then looking that number
up in the table, you can figure out the angle that the blood hit the wall
at. This can tell you where the crime was committed.
Ten divided by
39 equals 0.2564. When this number is checked with the sine section of a trigonometry
table, you can see that the blood hit the wall at an angle of roughly 15 degrees.
Other
blood spatters with the same proportion of width to height would also have
hit the wall at 15 degrees.
When you check some other spatters, you
see that their proportions are different -- they hit the wall at different
angles.
By looking at a number of these blood spatters
on different surfaces, you can tell where they came from. After analyzing
them you can say with certainty where the victim was standing when he was
hit.
So, while math is used on the job, it is used for fairly simple
calculations. But if math isn't your best subject, you can breathe a sigh
of relief. There are now computer programs that will do these calculations
for you.