Engineers & Textbooks..

[ManicMechanic]

I refer to some of my 20-year-old engineering textbooks (mainly Control Theory, but also Signal Processing) fairly regularly. I teach math at a junior college (something I never thought I'd do 20 years ago) after having earned an EE (something I shouldn't have done 20 years ago). In classes ranging from refresher arithmetic to calculus, I frequently am asked, "When would anyone ever actually USE parabolas, complex fractions/the quadratic equation /polynomial fractions /LaPlace Transforms?" I then drag out my old textbooks and read them some word problems on satellite dishes, feedback/wheelchair design, resonance/bridge stability, and bandpass filters. While the equations are a bit advanced for them, they can at least get a sense of how math is really used.

The outdated technical books without good word problems have been used as gag gifts by my son. A number of friends have received a book on PNP transisistors, approximation theory, or multivariate analysis with a gift card inside. The older, more esoteric sounding they are, the better. For one book with particularly outdated, obscure material, we cut out a space in the pages which was the right size for a Nintendo handheld (try taking THAT to the doctor's office).

I have tried googling to find good word problems but have been largely unsuccessful. I may be searching for the wrong things, but I usually can't seem to get quite what I'm looking for.