On Thu, 2009-01-15 at 17:06 -0500, Steve Schafer wrote:
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009 13:21:57 -0800, you wrote:
Where, in the history of western civilization, has there ever been an engineering discipline whose adherents were permitted to remain ignorant of the basic mathematical terminology and methodology that their enterprise is founded on?
Umm, all of them?
Really. So the engineer who designed the apartment building I'm in at the moment didn't know any physics, thought `tensor' was a scary math term irrelevant to practical, real-world engineering, and will only read books on engineering that replace the other scary technical term `vector' with point-direction-value-thingy? I think I'm going to sleep under the stars tonight...
No one may be a structural engineer, and remain ignorant of physics. No one may be a chemical engineer, and remain ignorant of chemistry. Why on earth should any one be permitted to be a software engineer, and remain ignorant of computing science?
Do you know any actual working structural or chemical engineers?
Um, no. I try to avoid people as much as possible; computers at least make sense. Also anything else to do with the real world :)
Most engineering disciplines require a basic grasp of the underlying theory, yes, but not much beyond that.
Perhaps I should have said `completely ignorant'? Or do you think that join . join = join . fmap join is of the same level of theoretical depth as quantum orbital mechanics?
Pretty much everything else is covered by rules (either rules of thumb or published standards).
Show me an electrical engineer who can explain the physics of a pn junction and how it acts as a rectifier, or a civil engineer who can explain why the stress/strain curve of a steel beam has the shape that it does,
Again, do engineers know *what* stress is? Do they understand terms like `tensor'? Those things are the rough equivalents of terms like `monoid'. jcc