When’s the last time you saw an engineer doing tensor calculus? And that said, whomever said Einstein wasn’t good at math has also never done tensor calculus.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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People mean different things when they say maths. To most, maths means calculating things using numbers. Engineering absolutely has more of that than physics. But there's so much more maths out there than the average person even knows about, like your example. Physics has more higher mathematics, and engineering has more calculating stuff using numbers.
whomever said Einstein wasn’t good at math
Got confused by the german grading system. Lower grades are better.
Tbh engineering, least aero, is mostly spreadsheets But I gotta keep deriving crap in physics, you think you’ve derived it all but you haven’t they just keep making more physics or some shit (wolfram alpha is bae)
Yeah physics really jumped the derivatives shark with snap crackle and pop
Edit: they just kept coming up with more fucking derivatives its now Snap, crackle, pop, lock and drop
They ducking have
Like why tf do I gotta care about the E field’s partial snap derivative in the X direction gdi I know full well the E field itself doesn’t give a shit about its snap
But then you gotta integrate somebullshit that’s been derived to the jerkth order back up the chain like a total goober
See, I wanted to major in math over engineering because engineering has less math. My husband is an engineer and he does very little math on a daily basis. The software does all the calculations when he runs simulations.
Going through college I'd always joke that "the math is the easy part"
I selected mechanical engineering because when I looked through the required courses it had the most math courses and the fewest english and communications type courses out of all of the available engineerings.
Isn't that true for most workplaces though? You'll end up using some tool that automates much of the heavy lifting and a lot will be meetings and managerial tasks anyways. When you design products you usually have engineers of many different fields that need to work together so lots of it is just talking about how to get it to work together.
For any applied math jobs, which is probably IT related you'll have the same issue.
Whether or not you're right about engineers other than your husband in particular, its probably true that "math" has more math, yeah 😄
Personally I preferred English classes to math classes because they had more English and less math.
People often don't understand that math is pretty much in all fields of STEM. For example students at my university start chemistry thinking they will be at most balancing chemical reactions or calculating concetrations, but then differential equations and linear algebra starts. During my first year about half of the students failed the introductory physics course.
I have a family member who studies fish at a post doc level. He had to learn a bunch of calculus and statistical analysis just to be able to actually make use of the data they collect. Anyone who wants to design and publish research has to have a pretty good grasp of a lot of math.
Anyone who wants to design and publish research has to have a pretty good grasp of a lot of math.
I invite you to have a look at some of the studies, when there is a new "pyschologists found out that your poor sleep comes from your mom having an affair with your goldfish" style headline. Then you find out they asked like 30 people they got from an online survery or so.
I work in biology and the amount of people who work in the field because they hate maths is... considerable. As others have said, the field is almost entirely quantitative and statistics nowadays, so, lol
Architecture was moved to a STEM field in 2019. I haven't had trouble with math, but due to the lack of exposure to it in architecture, I didn't do good on the math exam needed for stem fields lmfao
As civil engineers we used to joke that architects are mostly artists and wouldn't know what they are doing.
There is some brilliant architects that do know their physics for building design and construction, but they seem to be far and few in between.
That's even a joke between architects. My brother in law regularly rants about some other architects and how they wouldn't be able to calculate a heating solution for a house if their life depended on it and the house were a black cube in interstellar space.
There's probably a reason why building plans for houses need to be signed off by a state approved structural engineer during the build application process.
Still don't get why you need maths for computer science. Like programming originated in maths or something? Maybe they just use it to filter people out. Seems to work quite well then.
Are you... Serious? Because computers are math machines. That's literally their purpose. If you're programming anything lower level than a JS app then you need to understand what's going on closer to the hardware. CS is a pretty general field and I appreciate the math classes that I've taken so far because I am planning to go into embedded systems and therefore will be actually using a lot of it.
I mean, it's definitely true.
Engineering has its share of math, it can get fairly complex (in the case of electrical engineering, it's literally complex), but being engineering it's often based in practical things. But, pure physics has weird-ass math invented just to deal with the messed up calculations required by quantum mechanics.
If you hate weird-ass math, you'll hate pure physics as lot more than any engineering discipline.
Engineering has the kind of math that can be plugged into spreadsheets and CFD simulations. It's the kind of math that might be really complicated, but you can get answers out of it, and those answers can be compared to reality. Physics has the "symbol manipulation" kind of math where you don't even deal with numbers, other than the occasional 2 or 3 when when something is squared or cubed.
Weird thing about studying mathematics was that there was barely any mathematics in there.
But engineers just let computers do all the maths!
Depends on the engineer. Some make the software which does the math.
Those are computer scientists
I think you'll find that the line between "computer scientist" and "software engineer" is rather blurred.
Although to be fair most simulation code I've come across was written by Physics majors who really shouldn't be writing code. Most of those implementations are a crime against engineering and humanity alike.
They do the job, though, and I suppose crimes against engineering are better than crimes against physics, if one had to choose.
Software engineers*. Computer scientists are concerned with the math behind computing and are mostly found in academia. Software engineers generally have a foundational knowledge of computer science they combine with software engineering principles to create robust software. Generally software engineers do have computer science degrees though.
They share a similar relationship as engineers and physicists.
Physics is the philosophy equivalent of the STEM world. You're not going to be able to find a job with physics alone and you're really just twisting numbers around in your head as a fun little challenge.
Like choosing cocaine over meth because the high is "smoother"
I mean...
I am not a massive fan of cocaine, and never have done meth, but I can see that making sense. Apparently meth come downs are brutal.
Hell the comedown on my Vyvanse was brutal and that was only 20mg oral. Awful anxiety until like 2 months in.
Me: I could spend a month getting deep into trigonometry… OR, I could spend a month looking for a library that contains someone else’s trigonometry.
We learn theory not to understand the derivation of the details, but to understand how the theory fits in with everything else. Using a library without understanding the theory just means you know that sin(angle) is just a number, but not how the number helps you work out the length of steel beam as it changes due to changes in angle.
They are simply not the same.
Source: working with juniors that can't do anything outside of what the libraries do for them.
Agreed, but almost everyone here can relate to trying to find efficiencies that end up costing you just as much time.
Math: boo, boring, numbers, what am I gonna do, become a teacher?
Engineering: cool, wires, electricity, sparky and things can go boom
I mean bio or chem engineering will def have a lot less maths.
cries in comp sci
If you don’t have at least 4 pages of math in your papers, you’re not a real engineer^TM^
different math 🙃
That's stupid considering I have to take physics for mechatronics.