The Concept of Dependence in Applied Mathematics; a First Account

This essay is about the scientific use of dependence and independence and other related concepts. There are many notions of dependence and independence used in science but only some of them will be studied here. One important notion of independence which I shall not deal with is the notion of independent events in probability theory. The notion of causal dependence is another important notion I shall leave out of account. The subject matter is rather the notions of dependence and independence which are central in most applications of mathematics to science.