It's very common for engineers to not understand
math.
You may be right about that. As a patent attorney,
there have been many
times I have had to correct mathematical equations given
to me by engineers,
and/or explain to them why I thought their inventions would
not work after
having gone through the math behind them.
Of course, despite
my advanced degree and experience in engineering,
some would not believe me.
One, for example, complained vociferously to
me that I didn't know what I was
talking about, because I was just a lawyer.
That was before he went into a
laboratory and tried to make his device work.
Then he discovered not only that
it didn't work, but that it failed in exactly the
particular way I said it
would.
So yes, I suppose I agree with you with regard to some engineers. I
think
it is actually very common for engineers not to understand mathematics.
And computer programmers tend
to think that there is only one kind of
mathematics -- discrete mathematics -
- and know absolutely nothing about
calculus, differential equations, Fourier
and Laplace transforms, wave
equations, and the like. Sometimes they even
refer to algebraic cookbooks to
solve their problems without even
understanding how or when to arrange their
calculations to avoid having
results that are critically dependent upon the
difference between two very
nearly equal quantities. While it is true that
today's computers make brute
force approaches more practical than they were
years ago, the use of such
approaches still cause computers to slow to a crawl
and/or compute much
more than is necessary and/or lose much of their precision
because people do
not understand that the numbers stored in computer memories
are only
approximations to real numbers, not the numbers, themselves.
So I
would argue that computer programmers also, as a group, do not know
much about
mathematics, or even algorithms, either.
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