r/engineeringmemes • u/endeavouringengineer • Aug 01 '26
Mathematicians vs Engineers...
277
u/adiliv3007 Aug 01 '26
No no, everything beyond x2 is lies, but x2 is very important
73
2
52
u/HumaDracobane ΣF=0 Aug 01 '26
What? I remember in my calculus I exam going up to the 7th "level" of the Taylor method....
PD: Yes, it was an LONG and painfull exercise... And the function wasn't exactly a clean one.
32
u/TheoneCyberblaze Aug 01 '26
What monster gives long and tedious computations in an exam? Usually they give lots of smaller ones that test whether you know the general process instead of one big thing where you can mess up at any of the 40 steps
I remember needing to bring a matrix into jordan normal form in an exam, at lest they had the decency to have it be a 2x2
14
u/HumaDracobane ΣF=0 Aug 01 '26 edited Aug 02 '26
Different countries, different methods.
In my country we have long 4-5 exercises of each "area" of the subject. You need a 5/10 in the whole exam to pass and it is also common that on each one you need a bare minimum to pass, so you can not just study 2-3 types of exercises and compensate them.
Edit: I re-redacted the post with the same message because I was aslept when I made it and almost got subpoenaed by The Hague.
3
u/AlphabetInk Aug 02 '26
I have had college DiffEQ exams with only two problems that I spent 3+ hours on, with multiple pages of written math. USA
2
u/OskarsSurstromming 27d ago
I had it once in Copenhagen with a long Taylor expansion, but then it was something that was easily differentiable so you either knew the total sum like ex or sin(x) with some constants or something, so it was a tedious exercise to brute force but very fast if you had followed the full curriculum
29
u/Flashy-Lie-5602 Aug 01 '26
lol I told my calc professor a while ago, “what is the point of this when I’m going to solve the numerically anyway.” His eye literally twitched lol.
12
u/ahf95 Aug 02 '26
So that you know how and when to modify the numerical method algorithm yourself, because often doing so can give dramatic improvements in modeling and simulation of systems with higher order dynamic couplings.
5
u/Flashy-Lie-5602 27d ago
I mean sure but as an engineer you rarely need a real time system and doing a Taylor series reduction especially on a real world problem is very error prone and difficult to check vs just modeling the basic physics of your system and letting a big computer chew at it for a few hours or days.
3
17
14
u/51alpha Aug 01 '26
+O(x2)
3
12
u/xgabipandax Aug 01 '26
It's just me or someone else also completely forgot most of the math related stuff learned in university?
Like my job don't really require 10% of what i've learned.
1
u/Necessary_Screen_673 Aug 03 '26
im still in school and all i remember are linear dif eq., basic calc, and stats. the rest is irrelevant to a junior engineer in most fields imo
3
u/xgabipandax 29d ago
I'm working as a manager of a manufacturing team, my job integrates the technical parts of the production processes with administration of the company, i mostly use statistics
6
3
u/hiimshana 29d ago
I kid you not, the moment a science needs the SECOND term of a Taylor expansion… you’re fucked
2
u/Such-Shop-9724 Aug 01 '26
wdym taylor expansion
f(0)+f'(0)x is already the taylor series
expansion is only when you dont take all terms (so only f(0))
1
u/pentapous Aug 01 '26
I remember this simplification exactly being part of many derivations throughout school.
4
1
u/numbersthen0987431 Aug 01 '26
My job is to make machines put snacks into bags. I don't need the x2 factors, lol
1
1
1
1
1
0
-1
u/KEX_CZ ΣF=0 Aug 01 '26
Just in front of my finals at bachelor's studies, yet I have touched this infamous "tailor equation" exactly 0 times, never needing it and never being thaught it. Why is everyone so obsessed with it? Clearly I and my fellow classmates are example of not needing it to know?
7
u/Field_of_cornucopia Aug 01 '26
It's the foundation of numerical methods (especially any finite element analysis, etc.).
1
0
u/KEX_CZ ΣF=0 Aug 01 '26
Oh. Then we just talked about the things connected and build on that, like the boundary conditions, meshification, etc.... And maybe we don't need it much as mechanical engineers, who knows....
209
u/patenteng Aug 01 '26
x^3 is actually very important for RF amplifiers. That’s because if you have two frequencies f1 and f2 that are close together, you’ll get a frequency at 2 f1 - f2 from the x^3 expansion, which will be close to the original f1 input and can cause interference.