Mathematicians vs. Engineering Classes be like...

To quote my professor "We don't solve integrals, that's what mathematicians are for."

"Actually this is what we called proof by shut the hell up"

To the Engineer, close enough is perfect. To the Artist/designer, there's no such thing as perfect. To The Mathematician, there's nothing except perfection.

“I literally hate engineering, it’s the worst shit ever.” Hey he’s an engineering student

"approximately is the same as equals. well, approximately. " This was glorious.

A mathematician, an engineer, and a statistician were out hunting in the woods. They crested the top of a hill, and saw a deer standing in the distance. Not wanting to get the shot wrong, the mathematician took some readings of the ambient air temperature, pressure, and wind speed, did a couple pages of calculations, and finally arrived at a number. Then he lifted the rifle to his shoulder, aimed to the precise angle that would hit the deer, and fired. The bullet missed, about 10 meters to the left. The engineer scoffed "Oh geez, gimme that." And he took the gun, removed the scope, bolted it back on crooked, then handed it back to the mathematician. "There." He said. "That should account for your error. Now take that exact same shot again." The mathematician fired again. The bullet landed 10 meters to the right. "We got him!" Cried the statistician.

Don’t get me started on Physicists and Mathematicians. I remember a moment in my Quantum Mechanics class in grad school the instructor paused, turned to the class and asked “are there any mathematicians in here?”. No one raised their hand. He then sighed relief and said “good, I didn’t want to have to justify what I’m about to do”. He then pulled a differential through an integral sign.

What I've learned in Engineering focused math classes about the approximately equal sign, is that it just means "close enough".

This integral is hard because its on the back of our table of integrals. That had me dying.

“Why be right when you can approximate” ~Engineers Still trying to recover

“but why do I have to know how to integrate by hand?” “you won't walk around with MATLAB in your pocket all the time.” Wolfram Alpha:

There is a joke my father told me once when I was child. He had dropped out from Physics, and is now a great carpenter. I'm now a Mathematics student. In a certain town, once was promoted a competition for the construction of bridges. One engineer, one physicist, and one mathematician were asked to make the best bridge possible, the perfect bridge. The engineer worked like he always did. He made the project, and in a few months the bridge was up. The bridge was good enough. The physicist took longer to make his bridge. By the end of the year, his bridge was up too. It was also good. The mathematician still had to hand in his project, though, so the competition was still not over. People waited for him for a long time. Days, months, years passed, and nothing from the mathematician. The people kind of just forgot about the competition, and it was left without conclusion. The town had two new bridges, and people used them in their daily lives, and they eventually payed no mind anymore to the competition that originated those bridges. Decades later, however, a student found out about the competition, and wondered "What about the mathematician?". The student went to the university, looking for the mathematician, and found his office. The student knocked on the door. A raspy voice responded "Come in.". The office was small and cluttered with paper, in piles, covering the desk, bursting out of drawers, and even piled over a couple of chairs. Sitting behind the desk, was a very old man. The student greeted him, and questioned him about the competition. "Why didn't you hand in your project? Did you forget about it? Did you give up?". The mathematician looked up to the student. "No. I've been working on it this whole time.". "And... do you already have an idea of how the bridge is going to be?", the student asked. To which the mathematician responded, excited, "No. But I know now, that the perfect bridge, it exists and it's unique!".

Mathematicians: "Do...do you approximate and round everything?" Engineers: "You get used to it."

The difference between theory and practice is that in theory, theory and practice are the same thing but in practice, theory and practice are not.

Engineers: Makes reasonable assumptions and approximations to make their calculations easier and more useful Mathematicians: And we took that personally.

If engineers wasted their time proving everything and being accurate, we would have stuck with technology from 18th century.

≈ = = such extremely important formula this is

“This one is pretty tricky, yep the solution is on the back of the table of integrals”

Sometimes I am in awe how people figured out the theorems where engineering stands so proudly of and then I hear a mathematician explain it and then I remember why I never bothered looking deeper into the foundations.

I can confirm the words "lookup table," "approximately," and "assume" are quite frequent in engineering classes