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Notes on Mathematics for Engineers (1959) [pdf]

30 points the-mitr 4 days ago 9 comments

nimitbhardwaj 59 minutes ago | parent

Would be good if it included linear algebra, probability and stats in details

melling 45 minutes ago | parent

1959.

nimitbhardwaj 37 minutes ago | parent

That time Linear algebra was of no use? Possible may be, Electrical, civil and Mechanical engineerings were mainstream

oldjohnnylane 42 minutes ago | parent

I once had a mentor that was trying to help me write a CPU characterization and being a phd in math every suggestion he proposed involved derivatives. I was like, why would I describe I486 cache misses in terms of differential equations? To this day I still don’t know what he meant.

rustybolt 34 minutes ago | parent

I remember a story about Feynman doing the same thing (analyzing a computer program with differential equations). Seems to have worked well for him.

See https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/4752749/how-could-f...

_alternator_ 30 minutes ago | parent

TBH, this might be a good time to figure out what he was talking about! A good continuous approximation of a discrete problem can radically simplify the situation. And current LLMs are extremely patient tutors.

oldjohnnylane 25 minutes ago | parent

Well it was 36 years ago and not sure where he is but I’m sending him positive vibes (he was old when I met him)!

stochastic_tn 30 minutes ago | parent

There’s a kind of grief that I feel when I think about how, over the last 70 years, engineers have tended to increasingly rely on tech that makes the math knowledge unnecessary.

The beauty of math has played a huge role in the career choices that I’ve made so far. I changed fields at one point because I realized that the math that practitioners used was almost exclusively all baked into CAD tools. I figured that if that was where the applied math lived, then I wanted to write software for a living.

With a lot of the AI tools now (which I use and appreciate daily FWIW), I’m beginning to see that even in math-heavy sub disciplines of software engineering (e.g. robotics), we’re not exempt from this trend.

aatd86 15 minutes ago | parent

I have never used more math since llms. My projects have just become more ambitious.