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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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