Engineering apprenticeships

[stu]

Engineering apprenticeships

Mechanical maths is far more difficult than electrical engineering maths lol.
Yeah 10 times fold!!!!

I picked Pure and Mech A Level Maths and dropped mech maths after 2 weeks knowing i woudlnt enjoy it and did double pure.

Mr Stu

[geoff]

Engineering apprenticeships

You want to put money on that statment Grant? I can think of some seriously diabolical maths to do with control circuits of switch mode DC power supplies!

[kodster]

Engineering apprenticeships

And in turn Grant can give you some seriously diabolical maths to do with mechanics.

... *backs away from discussion*

[stu]

Engineering apprenticeships

LMAO @ Kody!!!!!! Yeah well Geoff you just make things over complicated for a few LEDs anyway. LMAO!!!!!

Mr Stu

[john]

Engineering apprenticeships

geoff is the master with LEDs

the PITA transformation was well good

[fwsorg]

Engineering apprenticeships

Not convinced. Mechanical maths reaches a certain point and stays there. Langrangian mechanics, Hamiltonian mechanics, a shed load of fluids equations modeling different things in a not very satisfactory way. Nothing conceptually very difficult and almost all with a basis in intuition (save for some Hamiltonian stuff, Id concede).

Electrical engineering, which I generalise to information engineering, suddenly shoots off into the distance. Perfect packing of error code spheres in higher dimensional space (currently grappling with in degree), state estimation and everything that entails - Kalman and H-Infinity filtering. Got a bunch of discrete logic strapped together and interested in the patterns it could produce? Galois Set Theory gives you the solutions. Why does this resistor produce thermal noise in the way it does? Quantum electrodynamics and the Central limit theorem. Id happily represent information engineering in a maths-off. This all assumes youve got the basics down like Fourier, Laplace and Z-transforms.

Annoyingly, to do anything useful in engineering, you kind of need to understand all of it to some degree or other. You wont get a satellite into Martian orbit without intimate knowledge of Kalman filtering or Quaternions and the Gyro equations. But hell - you can do anything once you understand a problem well enough to know what you dont know.

But whatever - do maths. Maths maths maths. Its incredibly useful - do something mathsy to at least A-level. Ignore what someone said about engineering grads being only good at maths and not anything practical. To do anything really useful or exciting, you need maths. You may be able to get away with just common sense and practical nowse (and there is a huge amount of value in those) in some kind of engineering, but even when I worked in an agricultural machinists, the chief machinist (one of three brothers) could still solve a 2nd Order differential equation - and thats agricultural engineering. If you ever want to do anything from MRI scanners to planetary exploration probes, nano robots to curing cancer (which I think will be solved by someone with an engineering before it is solves by a biochemist - the difference is that we can do maths, and a lot of bio-chemists I talk to concede that and are excited by all the life science departments opening up in engineering departments), you need maths. You would not believe how much and varied maths you need to be able to make a computer be able to recognise a cat from a dog. Its just the tool you need to describe and understand whats going on, and you cant find a good solution to a problem until you really understand it.

Dont give up. Do further maths if you can. Mechanics and Statistics and Pure - anything they do at A-level will probably be entirely subsumed within one year of a decent engineering degree course. If you ever find yourself sitting through A-level maths thinking this is just maths for the sake of maths, its not. Its the basic bread and butter youll use every day. You couldnt even begin to have a point unless youre a professor of something very abstract and pure. And even then - Archimedes, Eudoxus, Apolonius, Plato - all convinced they were doing pure philosophical stuff, wouldnt have much liked the idea of it being engineering.

You can never have learnt enough maths.

If you have not yet got the message,

MATHS.

[typhoon_driver]

Engineering apprenticeships

Suddenly I am thinking about dropping engineering and going to work in Tesco.....

[stu]

Engineering apprenticeships

LOL @ Gary. Dont do that, once your in, theres no coming out. lol.

Eddy nice to see your still alive me old chap!

Mr Stu