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Chemists use math in many ways, but one of the most common is probably in balancing the equation of a chemical reaction. If you want to create a chemical by mixing together raw materials or other chemicals, you need to figure out how much can be produced with how much of each substance to avoid wasting materials.

For example, (this is unrealistic but it works) if you wanted to make pure water out of pure hydrogen and oxygen, you would use the equation

H + O --> H2O. (See the Discussion page for more details)

Chemists work with much more complex chemical equations than the formation of water, so they have to figure out how to make all the numbers match up with a combination of quick mental math and intuition. Once the equation is balanced, they need to do some algebra (made fairly easy with calculators and knowledge of how to "plug in" values) to find the optimal masses to use.

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14y ago

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