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Wed, 30 Mar 2005
the engineers' conceit (or is it just MIT?)
Haven't blogged in a bit, but I had a realization a few days ago that I thought I might share with y'all. The other night, I went to TGI Friday's with a horde of friends. During dinner, I was talking with Matt Powell, a co-worker of mine who's also MIT '02, M.Eng '04. Somehow, the topic of raising children came up, at which point I asked the age, in his opinion, at which one was capable of grasping calculus and differential equations. After some discussion, we settled on 12ish as probably the earliest one would want to teach their child such things. A couple of the people sitting near us (not engineers) overheard this and questioned why any sane person would ever do something like that. I immediately, almost instinctively, responded that a person couldn't carry on an intelligent conversation about anything technical, or even really understand much going on around him, without a grasp of calculus and diff. eq., and (in so many words) that people who didn't have such a grasp were basically worthless. Matt expressed agreement. Then we remembered that we were in non-engineer company, and that there were maybe two or three other people at the table of fifteen who'd taken anything beyond maybe "college algebra." This apparently failed to cause Matt any discomfiture, since, well, he's Matt, and he tells it like he thinks it is no matter how unpleasant that might be. I, on the other hand, was somewhat embarrassed. I still think I'm right, though. People who don't have at least some basic grasp of calc, diff. eq., mechanics, and E&M (the latter two being little more than the application of the former) must go through life in some sort of epic fog. [ permalink | 11 comments ] |
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