 There are two major areas in which the discussion of whether mathematics can play an explanatory role in science makes itself felt. The first concerns issues of modeling and idealization in science and more generally, as pointed out in section 1, the nature of scientific explanation. The second, concerns the nominalism-platonism debate. By and large the former area is a major concern to philosophers of science. The latter is the preoccupation of those philosophers of mathematics primarily concerned with issues of existence of mathematical entities. There are however non-trivial intersections between the two areas. These are surveyed in the next two sub-sections.