I reckon that most people that study abstract algebra, analysis or other forms of pure maths never get anywhere near actually doing anything useful with it. Other than teaching or researching it there are just so few jobs out there that require it, so in that sense I relate it much more to an arts subject.

It can be enjoyable to study and you will pick up some useful skills along the way, but as far as reusing any of it in a job; forget about it.

It’s for those reasons that I turned my maths degree around to focus almost entirely on calculus based subjects, which at least finds uses every day in engineering and physics. Albeit I’m not doing any of that either in my job, and use more stats based analytics.

What’s the equation for monkey touching?

takisawa2 – Member
Laplace Transforms, Fourier Series.
The months spent on this crap on my Mech Eng degree would have been better spent elsewhere, without a doubt.

Wow some of the mostly widly used methods in Engineering has been declared crap! What do you propose should be taught.

I reckon that most people that study abstract algebra, analysis or other forms of pure maths never get anywhere near actually doing anything useful with it. Other than teaching or researching it there are just so few jobs out there that require it, so in that sense I relate it much more to an arts subject.

There are not many jobs in industry but they are out there, but there are very few people with a good enough level of maths in these areas anyway. A maths degree dose not tend to bring you to a high enough level to use most of the maths you learn.

Research is however an incredibly useful job and without it there would be no progress in industry.

Pure maths. What’s it not for?

Sorted. 🙂

I always thought Pure Maths was useless maths, and when they found a use for it it became Applied Maths.

Preferred Pure Maths 🙂

And they say STW is populated by nerds…

I always found applied maths too full of “compromises and inaccuracies” at degree level.

Applied maths simply held no beauty for me compared with linear and abstract algebra (especially convex sets, groups, rings and Galois theory) which is where I specialized in my final year.

And as for statistics, then as far as I could tell that was there for the less able students so they could get a degree after three years.

Where I studied 2nd and 3rd year pure maths seemed to be the courses that really shuffled the pack. The strong students sailed through the courses whilst the weaker ones sunk without a trace.

Pure maths also seemed to get easier each year as the underlying patterns repeated themselves across topics. My third year at University was by far the easiest of the three. Perhaps that is why a liked it so much, whereas before university my interests seemed to be more aligned to applied mathematics, although at that level the differences are perhaps not as clear cut.

I haven’t done to badly out of it, although I don’t use any aspects of any of my degrees in my job.

How about the internet, online shopping, mobile phones, computers, etc. hard to think of anything modern that is electronic that doesn’t rely on a heavy dose of pure maths.

As for fourier transforms, they are great, but academic engineers are way too focused on them – when I worked in audio, every so often an engineer would turn up and say what you need here is some kind of processing using fourier transform, then it would sound crap, and the code would be replaced by an audio programmer, using a quick hack in the time domain, which was usually way more efficient and sounds better.

Applied maths simply held no beauty for me compared with linear and abstract algebra (especially convex sets, groups, rings and Galois theory)

Stop it, you’re turning me on! 🙄

Mythbusters proved an aircraft can take off from a conveyor belt by actually doing it. Didn’t need no fancy maths just a long strip of canvas dragged down a runway with a plane travelling in the opposite direction and it took off.

They had a strip of canvas being pulled down the runway at over 100mph? I bet not – the reason the plane took off is that they weren’t getting the conveyor belt speed to match the plane speed – after all it’s obvious that the plane could take off if the conveyor belt is going slow enough. That’s where practical experimentation falls down you see – the maths tells you it won’t work.

Other than teaching or researching it there are just so few jobs out there that require it, so in that sense I relate it much more to an arts subject.

Except maths is right or wrong.

the maths tells you it won’t work.

Maybe if you’re bad at maths it does…? It will take off.

Pure maths. What’s it for?

It’s how a computer works but without the logic 🙂

[psling, Pure Maths A Level 1974]

They had a strip of canvas being pulled down the runway at over 100mph? I bet not – the reason the plane took off is that they weren’t getting the conveyor belt speed to match the plane speed – after all it’s obvious that the plane could take off if the conveyor belt is going slow enough. That’s where practical experimentation falls down you see – the maths tells you it won’t work.

This is either laughable or a troll….

I seem to remember a long complicated thing called Bernoulli’s principle (or similar) for working out flow within pipes. I therefore think the maths nerds here should use that to tell us what the best brake hoses are to use

Oh, and let’s not start the conveyor belt thing again – Won’t someone think of the children?