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Nano-Passion
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mathwonk said:if you are after money, become a salesman. deceiving people is always more lucrative than enlightening them.
I agree, can I post that on my facebook? I will quote you. ^.^
mathwonk said:if you are after money, become a salesman. deceiving people is always more lucrative than enlightening them.
mathwonk said:I am one pure mathematician who is guilty of teaching lots of math courses filled with proofs and short on applications. the truth is i taught what i knew and was interested in myself, and what was in the books we used. now that i am old and a little wiser i might teach differently but i am retired.
my logic in the old days was that understanding the ideas would enable you to apply them yourself, so i hope that is true.
geo77 said:As an electrical engineer I think physics at the college level gives people a clearly better background than math. I've met and I've worked with both categories and in most cases the math education seems narrower. I've always been impressed with physics graduates working in various companies. I cannot say the same about the math graduates.
If you want a beter standard of living go to an engineering school and specialize in EE in particular analog design. Within a few years of graduation you can be making over 120K or even more and I am not talking of California where salaries are higher.
Of course some people are purists and dream of shaping the mathematics field. Good luck with that. When we were young and naive most of us had such dreams. Nowadays the education is such that the degrees don't mean much anymore. Most of the people in industry or academia are simply parroting stuff from books and don't understand the science at a very basic level. From a handful of guys creating a treasure of knowledge 100 years ago out of nothing, the scientific field moved into a situation where hundreds or thousands of scientists with large budgets and equipment can barely make some incremental and slow progress.
Some might counter me by saying that there are so much more patents awarded and papers published nowadays. That's true, but 50 or 100 years ago a paper was published when the author had something important to say and today most of the papers are iddle chatter adding very little to what was already said. This is because the system forces increased minimum quotas on scientists while at the same time making them more compliant rather than more inquisitive and curious. Now more and more people go to school and get a degree than ever before. Is the degree type of any importance? I think it is, but less than what some people believe.
My blog: http://excelunusual.com"
geo77 said:As an electrical engineer I think physics at the college level gives people a clearly better background than math. I've met and I've worked with both categories and in most cases the math education seems narrower. I've always been impressed with physics graduates working in various companies. I cannot say the same about the math graduates.
If you want a beter standard of living go to an engineering school and specialize in EE in particular analog design. Within a few years of graduation you can be making over 120K or even more and I am not talking of California where salaries are higher.
Of course some people are purists and dream of shaping the mathematics field. Good luck with that. When we were young and naive most of us had such dreams. Nowadays the education is such that the degrees don't mean much anymore. Most of the people in industry or academia are simply parroting stuff from books and don't understand the science at a very basic level. From a handful of guys creating a treasure of knowledge 100 years ago out of nothing, the scientific field moved into a situation where hundreds or thousands of scientists with large budgets and equipment can barely make some incremental and slow progress.
Some might counter me by saying that there are so much more patents awarded and papers published nowadays. That's true, but 50 or 100 years ago a paper was published when the author had something important to say and today most of the papers are iddle chatter adding very little to what was already said. This is because the system forces increased minimum quotas on scientists while at the same time making them more compliant rather than more inquisitive and creative. Now more and more people go to school and get a degree than ever before. Is the degree type of any importance? I think it is, but less than what some people believe.
geo77 said:As an electrical engineer I think physics at the college level gives people a clearly better background than math.
geo77 said:I've met and I've worked with both categories and in most cases the math education seems narrower. I've always been impressed with physics graduates working in various companies. I cannot say the same about the math graduates.
geo77 said:If you want a beter standard of living go to an engineering school and specialize in EE in particular analog design. Within a few years of graduation you can be making over 120K or even more and I am not talking of California where salaries are higher.
mathwonk said:of course i do not know any physics so what would i know?I do not mean to be rude, but i think you are being too modest! In several threads i have seen you give mathematical explanations with a physical intuition behind them. By "not knowing ANY physics" do you mean you have yet to get around to Quantum field theory? :tongue:
mathwonk said:thank you. i guess i mean i don't feel that i understand physics. I kind of bailed in freshman year from the basic physics course because it just was not precise enough for me. I remember one triumph in a homework set where it was very tempting but not quite satisfying to write the solution as a certain imprecise integral. I spent a long time working out exactly what that integral should mean and explained it on my paper. The grader said mine was the first in over a hundred papers to make clear what I was doing.
But as time went on the number of occasions where one had to provide some assumptions that had been stated in order to make progress just lost me. I need everything to be made clear or I don't know what to assume. I still remember trying to solve problems in a book by a famous physicist like Pauli or someone where he blithely said "well, since space is homogeneous, we may assume...". But he had never said he was assuming that, so of course I did not give myself that hypothesis.
The same thing happened in the basic physics homework, you had to make some assumptions that had not been stated to solve the problems, and I just did not have that gift. In the other direction, I do think physicists often make good mathematicians, because they have good intuition, and just need to learn to be rigorous. So I agree that taking physics classes can help a mathematician learn ideas that underlie much mathematics. Maybe that's what the electrical engineer was trying to say. But he does sound a little grumpy and cynical. He has some cool visual stuff on his site though. You might enjoy checking it out.I also have no fear at all of being told the realities of the job world, indeed it is valuable information. However, of the two people in my immediate circle, one a (BA) math major working in silicon valley, and one a (BS) EE working in the defense industry, I think the math major makes considerably more. I however, a (PhD + postdoc work) professor in academia, make considerably less than both. But I like what I do and probably would not want to switch with either of them.
DrummingAtom said:I think I'm about to give into math, but applied math not pure. I'm taking Diffy Q/Linear Algebra this semester and I'm blown away by the material. At the start of the semester I thought learning about predator-prey models were going to be boring but it's turned out to be anything but. The graphs almost look like art to me. Differential equations feels like it's a combination of all the math I've ever learned.
The thing that worries me about going higher in math is that it might get too abstract for me. I'll flip through some different Diffy Q books in the library and some of them aren't visual at all. In higher math do the problems get away from the visual aspect and more abstract? Or does it depend on the topic? Specifically, in applied math.
Is it possible that differential equations can get any cooler?
DrummingAtom said:The thing that worries me about going higher in math is that it might get too abstract for me. I'll flip through some different Diffy Q books in the library and some of them aren't visual at all. In higher math do the problems get away from the visual aspect and more abstract? Or does it depend on the topic? Specifically, in applied math.
Is it possible that differential equations can get any cooler?
Have you picked out your nursing home yet? Any favourite coffin designs?synkk said:i'm approaching 20 years old
synkk said:I'm wondering if it's too late to pursue a career in mathematics, I'm approaching 20 years old...
mathwonk said:[tex]x^2\sqrt{x}[\tex]
well? why doesn't it work?