How much Calculus?

[Ether]

Originally Posted by Don Rotolo

Some advice I wish I had as a college freshman: If you don't understand it, or are struggling to keep up, ask for help. Sometimes you need to look beyond your professor (there may be a personality difference), but once you find someone who can explain it in a way YOU understand, it gets a LOT easier.

Great advice Don.

And don't limit yourself to instructors... purposely seek out and develop friendships with other students in each class who are serious about doing well. Make learning the subject material part of your common interest.

[Foster]

With middle school roboteers no Calc, lots of geometry. We engineers have decided that PI=3 for all calculations. In a 12' space the .14159 part isn't making any noticeable difference.

In my job, lots of basic math and a ton of stats (project manager). Most along the lines of "probability of meeting the deadline on Tuesday is none." After slogging though calc classes, I'd rather have the stat classes.

Gary mentioned matrix math, I did a ton of that when hand crafting graphics routines in hand crafted Fortran and assembler. Cycle times were slow and you had to wring everything out of each instruction. The Winter Session Matrix Math class saved me in some tough situations.

[EricVanWyk]

Originally Posted by jmanela

How much to engineers actually use calculus? What is the proportion of Non-Calc vs. Calc computations?

It depends on why you are asking. If you are attempting to justify skipping out on one moment of calculus, you will just be shooting yourself in the foot. The more math you have available to you, the more interesting things you will be able to do in your career. If you are asking whether you should take additional e.g. statistics instead of additional calculus, let us know what you are interested in.

Gary said it better than I could:

Originally Posted by Gary Dillard

Frequently I have to derive my own beam equations for unique situations that aren't available in Roark and that requires differential and integral Calculus.

Originally Posted by Gary Dillard

Sometimes there are easier ways to get the answer but if you want to understand the sensitivity of the answer to variable parameters you really need to derive the equations yourself.

In my (brief) career, I've used a lot of calculus, algebra, and linear algebra, but the math that has proved most useful to me has been optimization theory and numerical methods.

My favorite thing to do as an engineer is to describe my system as a series of equations (see Gary's post), massage those equations to describe what I want my system to do, and then translate it back. Or, even better, having a machine crunch over those equations and optimize them for me. Any weekend adventure you take is made better by the knowledge that something is doing your work for you while you relax.

[Molten]

Originally Posted by Foster

We engineers have decided that PI=3 for all calculations. In a 12' space the .14159 part isn't making any noticeable difference.

Here in Indiana, we made a law stating this a while back. Needless to say, it didn't go over too well for alot of things. I find the pi button works just as well as the 3 button on my calculator and have yet to find a need to round until the end. I'm not saying rounding won't work for some things, but to all students reading this beware. Teachers do count off.

Jason

[ChrisH]

Originally Posted by Ether

Great advice Don.

And don't limit yourself to instructors... purposely seek out and develop friendships with other students in each class who are serious about doing well. Make learning the subject material part of your common interest.

Upper classmen can be a great resource. I was struggling for a whole quarter with some math for Physics. A guy a year ahead of me saw what I was struggling with and gave a very simple explanation of what was going on. It took about 15 minutes to go from failing to a C. I still wish I had talked to him before Finals week.

[jmanela]

It's kind of hard to quote every single post that was put on this thread, but if it didn't take up too much space would. Thanks for all of your advice. For me, it's not that I wasn't necessarily scared of calculus, it's just that I came across another forum where many engineers said they did not use calc that much. So I tried the same question on CD and got more of an opposite response.

However, a common response that I got from both forums is just the knowledge of calculus and knowing the meanings behind problems can be just as helpful as a small calculation.

BTW here is the link to the other forum if you are interested.

[Chris Hibner]

I use calculus and differential equations on a very regular basis.

For a job like mine, the most important thing is to know how to set up a calculus problem or a differential equation. Therefore, having a very good knowledge of what an integral or derivative really means is of utmost importance, and I think that gets lost on a lot of people. If a problem is put in front of you and you can say, "what we need is X, which can be determined as the integral of f(x,t,etc.)" and write the equation, that's the big deal. From that point on, most of the time the actual integration is done numerically in the algorithm that we're designing.

I summary, VERY MUCH of my job is setting up the correct equations so the algorithms can do the calculus in real-time. In that respect, I use a lot of calculus and differential equations on a daily basis.

[mplanchard]

I taught Calculus for 10 years and used Calculus as a mechanical engineer in my work - but not all the time. I always used to tell my students that Calculus makes your other math skills stronger. When I was an engineering student, all I wanted to be was a design engineer. But engineering teaches you how to solve problems, not just the ones that are Calculus-based. You can solve customer problems, field engineering, support, marketing and social problems - sometimes Calculus doesn't stand out. It is just a tool to describe a problem.

Marie's tips - know - really know the unit circle with all its common values both in decimal and radical form, 30-60-90 degree, 45-45-90 degree and pythagorean triples - most common 3-4-5 but there are others 5-12-13, 8-15-17, 7-24-25. Most engineering text books has exercises that can be done without a calculator knowing these relationships and the ratio of sine, cosine, and tangent.

Watch - really watch the minus sign. The most common error is caused by this little sign. I once had a professor take off 20 points in a differential equation exam question. I filled two blue books to answer the question - got the correct value - wrong sign. Lesson learned.

Units, units and more units. It is a must - most dont use until the end of the problem but know your units and use them - watch radians and revolutions; they are not the same. Label all answer with units. You should feel as comfortable with inches as you are with SI. Most engineering schools use SI units in the world - we are global. Marie

[Brandon Holley]

Originally Posted by mplanchard

Units, units and more units. It is a must - most dont use until the end of the problem but know your units and use them - watch radians and revolutions; they are not the same. Label all answer with units. You should feel as comfortable with inches as you are with SI. Most engineering schools use SI units in the world - we are global. Marie

The best teacher I ever had was my high school chem AP teacher. He would constantly stress units to us saying his famous phrase:

"Take care of your units, and your units will take care of you!"

Truer words have never been spoken. I cannot tell you how many times I've been able to get through a tough problem or catch a wrong answer by just following what happens to my units all the way through a problem. As you start to apply calculus to problems in class, you will surely discover this too.

-Brando