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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   23408 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 1, 2025

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You should have known better than to go to engineering school. Stick with CS, if you must take physics, take physics for physics majors where the problems will all have round numbers, and whatever you do, DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, and you can get by with much less effort.

(I took differential equations. It left scars)

Eh, most diffEQ classes are taught at a super introductory level, and if there is much difficulty, it's actually because they're taught at a super introductory level, in the style of, "You just need to memorize these various magic tricks," which is supremely unhelpful to building intuition. There's a more significant jump when going to something like differentiable manifolds, because that's generally only targeted at math grad students, so they often go into the other ditch in terms of rigor.

Understanding diffEQ is nearly essential for the sciences. Honestly, I don't know how one would survive physics for physics majors without it; generally it's the super introductory versions of physics that skip the differential equations and again require you to just memorize a bunch of magical formulas that seem to come from magic. It's the physics for physics majors that show how all the typical super simplified problems are just pretty easy differential equations. It even came up in some neuroscience classes I took (scared the pants off the bio majors, but was unsurprisingly the easiest part of the material for me). One can't hide even in CS, at least not today. I mean, even just the extremely rudimentary concept of gradient descent. Even manifold stuff; I still see manifold learning stuff popping up here and there. I guess if you want CS for web design, sure, but if you're thinking CS for cutting edge tech, you need a pretty large chunk of math these days.

DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS, and you can get by with much less effort.
(I took differential equations. It left scars)

I thought DE was challenging but it was far from the worst class I took. By the time I was done, I could do integration by parts in my head for not-too-complex setups (very helpful in later eng classes). No danger of me doing that now. Depressing how much those skills have atrophied.

You should have known better than to go to engineering school. Stick with CS

Alas, that wouldn't have helped what with requiring more formal math and logic theory in turn. I already only passed the one required logic course by bribing my ex-gf to do the mandatory course project for me.

<whatever you do, DON'T TAKE DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIO<NS, and you can get by with much less effort.

Ah, see... Things didn't (and still don't) work like that over here. The basic math courses and physics courses were largely the same and the difference was more complex analysis for EE vs more formal stuff for CE/CS and that isn't even getting into the horrors of discrete mathematics. So I did the only thing a reasonable person could do and passed most of the maths courses with the minimum passing grade (mostly on second try) and put it all behind me by burning the course book the next summer (Adams' Calculus, gods I hated that book). Pro tip: Make sure you have enough lighter fluid because those books are really hard to burn.

Alas, that wouldn't have helped what with requiring more formal math and logic theory in turn. I already only passed the one required logic course by bribing my ex-gf to do the mandatory course project for me.

Ah, logic and discrete math didn't bother me. Stuff that requires 10 pages of for a single problem did, because it was so easy to make a mistake early on and produce 20 pages of nonsense instead. And actual advanced math I'd tend to just bounce off the notation and terminology, which there's so much of.

actual advanced math I'd tend to just bounce off the notation and terminology, which there's so much of.

I'm pretty sure I have some sort of math "symbol blindness". If you wrote equations using regular letters and abbreviations, I'd say "Yeah, that's tricky but not too horrible" while using greek letters and math symbols would immediately result in "WTF is this shit I can't even...".

if you must take physics, take physics for physics majors where the problems will all have round numbers

It's all fun and games until you get to the physics for physicists and the are no numbers. At some point it's more abstract math than anything else, and as they say in the biz: Math ain't about numbers.

It's all fun and games until you get to the physics for physicists and the are no numbers.

Hell, by the time I passed the last mandatory EE math course in university, the only numbers in the formulae were single digits. We were allowed to use regular non-graphical calculators but were (correctly) told that we weren't going to need them for anything in the exam.

For physics at my university, DiffEq was required for Advanced E&M. I did not know that, and somehow took Advanced E&M first. The experience was... humbling. DiffEq itself later on was much more manageable.

Relatedly, I know at least three people who developed serious depression by taking Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning. I can still scare one of them by saying the words "rigorous proofs" in a Russian accent.

I can still scare one of them by saying the words "rigorous proofs" in a Russian accent.

Or "Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrisation of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold". (Боже мой!)

"Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrisation of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold"

A true Lovecraftian tome.

Mankind was not meant to know some things…

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