This entry may bore you a little bit, but, you know, I'm a geek at heart.

In class last night, I once again had the opportunity to witness first-hand the massive difference between mathematicians and engineers. The professor simplified a model, by substituting variables, to a simple linear function of one variable. Extremely easy to solve, plug the answer into a few other equations and get the rest of the details. To get to this nice pretty simple equation, he went through about 4 steps.

So, he declared a vote, which problem was "best" to solve. I voted for the 4th step. This simple, pretty, nice equation was a good solution for me. Two Mech Eng collegues voted the same way as I did. The mathematicians divided their votes among step 2 and 3. Weird, I thought. So he asked us to justify ourselves. The mathematician justification was that the 2nd and 3rd step give you a better description of the entire system. Whereas the 4th step doesn't describe everything (because so many variables had been removed from the model). What crap! Obviously these people have never actually had to find a solution to a problem in their life, because I don't care about a set of equations that I can figure out a system from - I want to get the fastest, simplest, most correct method to find the answer.

I'm just weird like that. Instead we spent the next hour solving the problem from step 2, which was a function of about 4 variables, and resulted in a topographic crazy looking plot that we had to read gradients off of. It took me a 15 minute discussion after class to even understand this plot. And for some reason, the math people though this was so much better than a nice, neat line. Go figure!