Engineering and math

I'm an EE and taking classes for my Master's. And I am again realizing my distaste for math. I don't hate it, I just really struggle with it. Is this weird?

I have always really enjoyed designing and building electronic things, and even daydream about it. I analyze everything beyond what I believe is normal, and am always trying to figure out better/easier ways to do things, and I'm employed as an engineer. Yet anything beyond high-school level math drives me nuts. Is it an oxymoron to like engineering but look at a complex math problem like it's written in Chinese?

Reply to
hondgm
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nah... I understand and appreciate the math, but I can't stand seeing it as anything beyond a tool for computing, say, the gain of an operational amplifier across a band of frequencies. Anything beyond that, and it's just an exercise in understanding something that will only be used to program a simulator.

-Drew

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote:

Reply to
Studio271

Yes. There is no engineering without math - just guesswork. We aren't cathedral builder from the middle ages.

Reply to
Homer J Simpson

snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote: Don't worry. I think most engineers have the same feelings to some extent. I know I do. (But it is neat when some math you barely remember solves the problem.

M Walter

Reply to
mark

Before, before my American friend.

Middle Age is approximately at 1300 to 1600.

~870, the first mentionable 'Dome' in Cologne.

'The' Cologne Dome started approx. 1000-1100 and ended (never ended, though) about 1760. With many festivals (part finishings, gotic chorus in 1322 for example) in between all that time.

Best Regards,

Daniel Mandic

Reply to
Daniel Mandic

Many EE's are highly effective even though they don't spend much time with the math. There's a lot of craft in EE.

-- and I _like_ the math and IMHO I'm pretty good at it, so it's not like I'm trying to bolster my own position, or anything.

--
Tim Wescott
Wescott Design Services
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Reply to
Tim Wescott

Not at all. Most practical design engineers will avoid complex math if at all possible.

I don't think so. A good majority of real world electronics engineering design does not need complex math. Triple integrals or other nasty squiggly lines in complex equations are fairly rare. For instance, I can't remember ever having to solve an integral since doing math at uni, but it's important to understand the concepts and be able to relate them to practical situations.

Of course, it all depends on the industray you are in. Some will use complex math every day, but for your everyday design work basic math will get you through - logs, trig functions, basic equations (often with mechanical aspects), complex numbers occasionally etc

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

Academic "engineers" love complex math, calculus and stuff. As a working circuit designer, I don't use calculus at all (except in understanding the basic concepts, integration and differentiation and differential equations aka closed loops) and could mostly get by with a 4-function calculator with square root. A little basic algebra is handy. For anything really complex and nonlinear - and everything is nonlinear - simulation is the way to go. A good feel for signal processing - Fouriers, convolution, mixing and modulation, stuff like that, is invaluable, but "feel" is usually enough.

Design is an emotional, qualitative activity, and analysis is an intellectual, quantitative activity, and Spice can do most of your analysis for you. So get that degree somehow and get out in the real world and design real stuff. Send me a resume.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Indeed, a lot of practical engineering is more seat-of-the-pants math in terms of understanding the implications rather than doing complicated problems as they were done in school. You need to know what it is going to look like, but you can resort to the computer for the actual numbers.

That is, assuming someone's already written the software, and that you have it available. Ironically, I do more "engineering math" in support of hobbies than I do for "work"... things like machining parts for musical instruments, or arguing about movements in ballroom dancing - when there aren't textbook methods to resort to and you are exploring a new field with methods borrowed from another, then you end up deriving (or rederiving) a lot of things from basic relationships.

Reply to
cs_posting

If you want to be a "cookbook engineer," sure, I'd agree -- and there are plenty of jobs for such people. If you actually want to be a *circuit designer*, no way -- you at least have to have an understanding of the somewhat more complex math that governs active devices, filters, etc. If you look at the work of well-known designers such as Bob Widlar (as in current source), Gilbert (as in mixer), Bob Pease ("bandgap czar"), etc., it's clear that -- no, they're not using finite field theory or something equally esoteric, but it's definitely some solid undergraduate math... bits and pieces of calculus, Laplace transforms (or Z transforms for discrete time), sensitivity calculations, etc.

There are many ways to be highly creative in, say, digital logic or software design that requires pretty much zero math... although even there, if you're called upon to make something really fast or complex, the math comes back (the folks who design the math co-processors for CPUs do some pretty heavy lifting, for instance, and the search routines in Google require a solid grounding in undergraduate linear algebra to understand -- your average programmer wouldn't have a clue how to make Google as fast as it is...).

Reply to
Joel Kolstad

Yep, I always laugh at engineers with their fancy programmable calculators as I watch them struggle to do their day-to-day maths problems, the most complex of which is usually calculating a parallel resistor value. Fancy stuff like square roots only come up about 10% of the time :->

My programmable calculators batteries have run dry *twice* since I last used it, it just sits in the cupboard gathering dust.

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

What, you don't love triple integrals? ;-0

Welcome to the club. I never could figure out what Sturm-Liouville theory in Partial Differential Equations class was all about, either. (Can't think of the last time I needed to use it, either.)

Michael

Reply to
mrdarrett

Well, if you use a straight wire you should know its impedance. Go to my page to find why and then read more on the Bessel functions and Sturm-Liouville theory.

All who use a straight wire should know its impedance :-) Ok, I'm just joking! ... , or maybe not ...

--
Sven Wilhelmsson
http://home.swipnet.se/swi
Reply to
Sven Wilhelmsson

That's because Engineers cheat with math in order to get results :-) The cathedral builders used maths for others to get a result long after they retired - they used simulators.

Visiting Barcelona I learned that the spanish architect Gaudi used string computing to calculate the placement of arches and pillars:

Real, physical, strings with scaled weights attached at important points along the string. The model would be inverted so he placed a mirror underneath to display the results of the simulation. I think that the string model must be the equal of a fairly decent computer running for a long time.

Gaudi robably learned that trick from the Cathedral builders.

Reply to
Frithiof Andreas Jensen

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I've got the name of a good psychologist who may be able to help you ;-)

In the time it would take to analyze that piece of wire in that way, most practical engineers with their rules of thumb and orders of magnitude could have designed an entire product! :-P

Dave :)

Reply to
David L. Jones

What are you calling a "complex math problem?" You don't need much math for electronic engineering if you work at low level applications, so I wouldn't be worried about it. And then again, just because something is amenable to a mathematical representation does not necessarily mean it's reasonable, realistic, or useful, nor does it imply you have an answer. Also, most of the mathematical presentation at the master's level is just so much immature junk.

Reply to
Fred Bloggs

I actually became irate as I sat in a course on signal processing, and when it came time (yet again) for Fourier transforms, and I said to myself, "Ok, here goes...finally, I can sit back, relax, and let this professor teach me what I am supposed to know already but actually don't. Whatever you do, don't let him do that thing where he tries to turn the whole class into a bunch of pattern monkeys.... Watch closely, Gibbs phenomenon, the whole bit...be one with the Fourier...breathe the Fourier..."

And in an instant, he went straight from 20-seconds of theory 20 minutes of cookbook rules on frequency-domain/time-domain mappings: "Differentation in frequency domain is equivalent to ...."

I was furious.

My eyes began to well in utter frustration, and I finally blurted out...

"When...oh when!!! ARE WE GOING TO ACTUALLY LEARN THIS STUF!! Anyone can read a table, but is there no one ELSE here who feels like I do, that they know a little but doesn't really KNOWWWW!!!!!..." My classmates remained mostly silent, but some of them quietly nodded. The professor stood speechless with his mouth open.

The teaching assistant came to the rescue by explaining that it was pointless to try to *really* teach us, that one needs to study theory of distributions first, and even then, it's still a matter of active research. Our heads would pop (at least mine would have).

I never studied theory of distributions, so I still don't know what Fourier transforms really are. But I do understand convulution and filtering, and I am sure others will agree that, when you can explain in simple terms at a birthday party why the TV needs to be tuned to channel 3 or 4 to process the signal from the video recorder, it's a good feeling.

I think forcing yourself to like the math is not a bad idea. The ratio of career time to college time is a large number, especially if you discount the non-technical courses that you were forced to take, and you should keep this in mind. Study math in bite-size pieces, and tuck each piece away as you conquer it. Learning on your own at a slower pace is not the same as being force-fed in college.

If you finally master gamma functions at 50, so what? It's fun!

-Le Chaud Lapin-

Reply to
Le Chaud Lapin

At 18, I was diagnosted with severe dyscalcula, and dyslexia runs in my familiy. My dad was a technician for a major defense contractor, and the engineers ther did every thing they could starting when I was 12 or so to make sure I would become a EE. Except check my math grades, which were horrible. Well college comes along and NO way are you gonna tell me I'm not gonna be a EE. Ruined my grades to the point they wanted to kick me out. Was transfered to Education, have equvalent to a masters in Social Studies.

Not that I hated teaching inner city kids, but...Guess what, when the ed job fell out, I suddenly found myself back doing engineering. Got promoted to Research Associate from Technician. I have 19 grad students that depend on me for hardware and systems operation, and keys to a 33 million dollar building including parts of it where the sun dont shine. I have personal responsibility for more hardware then I ever dreamed of, and while I need it from time to time, math is a very small part of my day, except when I'm in the machine shop. 90% of the circuit design gets done in my head with ohms law, the rest can be modeled on paper, and the nasty 1% I set down with the boss or a postdoc who love math. We make some pretty state of the art stuff, but undertsnading how a RC charges or differntiates on a scope pretty much does it, as well as assuming that life and just about everything in it is a transmission line. I go home and play with waveguide at 10 ghz for fun.

hang in there and learn the math, one of the things that clobbered me, is I learned work arounds for what I needed to do when teh math hits the fan. Oh, and if I'm debugging a filter design, I can usually outguess the design software when I'm doing the curve fitting. Funny thing, as you get older, the math starts to come to you as you need it. I probably could go back and get my EE, but why, when the local IEEE meets, I've been greeted as a near equal, once they find out I spent years as a self employed field engineer.

Oh, and I do asics and asm on a daily basis. Fourier is a good friend.

hang in there,

Steve Roberts, BSED

Reply to
osr

please excuse my spelling in the above post, I'm in a real hurry this morning and didnt proofread it.

Steve Roberts

Reply to
osr

Ah, yes. J_0, Y_0, I_0, K_0. I remember those. Also erfc(eta) and the infinite series of sines and cosines. Solutions to PDEs.

But Sturm-Liouville continues to elude me.

Also... what's the deal with (in)homogeneous boundary conditions? I vaguely remember that inhomogeneous boundary conditions were Bad, and

*something* was done to render them homogeneous. (Was that why we had to make them dimensionless?)
Reply to
mrdarrett

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