My BScEE course in the 60’s was a 5-yr program and we had math classes in all 5 years. I sort of feel sorry for those who quit math in high school. It’s like seeing the preview and never getting to see the movie.
At SUNY @ Stony Brook in the late 1980s, if you graduated with a BScCS (computer science,) you were 9 hours short of a minor in math. Many who graduated went in that direction.
In fact, my CS101 professor (yes, a REAL professor teaching a first semester CS wash-out course) had his doctorate in "Numeric Solutions to Partial Differential Equations." But he couldn't explain the difference between a function and a relation. Brilliant guy, but he was at Stony Brook for research, and he couldn't teach worth a darn.
Mark
I work as a maintenance mechanic in health care facilities. my primary background was HVAC and electrical. High school grad with 4 years Navy working on Chill Water A/C units and two post Navy time courses one was Industrial Electricity.
One hot afternoon a three phase motor burnt up on a critical air handler at work. My boss was in a panic and called a contractor who said it would be a 48 hour turnaround to get it rewired and that was air shipping it out of town. I told him we have a spare one in the storage room. He said the one that burnt up is a six wire motor and two 45 amp circuit contacts. I looked at the spare and it was 90 amps three wire three phase. I said get me some help to manhandle the old one out and I'll get this one up and running. He said it won't work. I tried to explain but then said I said trust me and give me an hour to identify the phase of the leads and I'll have it up.
We got the motor mounted and I place the leads in a safe place I could work them hot. About a half hour checking and triple checking my measuring the voltages and I had the six wires each paired to the right one. I hooked it up and the contractor pulls up as we were fixing to test it. I told him what I'd done he thought for a second then grinned and said Yeap fire it up.
Common sense often means more than being able to work complex formulas. I was the only man of the six who worked in my shop who knew how to work in a building wired three phase including the house panels for lights.
One day we were putting in GFCI outlets. I took one hall another guy too the other. He came to me after a while and said he was getting shocked. He said I killed the breaker but I'm getting shocked. I said did you kill the one above it and below it as well? He looked at me like what would it matter it's 120 volts. It was in conduit only requiring one neutral for the two hot conductors. He was breaking the neutral and getting bit because the other circuit on the neutral was hot. That building had a 2000 amp system.
I had the aptitude early on even in grade school for working on things including building my own transistor radios. But I can not study books except to obtain what I need to know to do the task. I didn't have the attention span that requires and it is a neurological impairment.
My dad who had a G.E.D. saw my interest in electrical work and encouraged it. He was a TELCO Central Office Switchman. He maintained a mechanical switching office designed for handling long distance dialing. Two floors the size of a small Walmart filled with bays of relays before the electronic switching technology was developed. He trained me in his office to troubleshoot, read diagrams, etc. Most of it hands on.
In the Navy I could stand Top Watch over ten Chill water plants for the 2000 tons of cooling the ship took. I could balance heat loads etc without working it out on paper. Some craftsmen adapt well to not having advanced math. My first F.I.L. was a mechanic on anything from a car to a 671 Detroit diesel. He had an 8th grade education and worked for Ryders as a truck mechanic. Would I want him to balance my checkbook? No LOL. But he was a great mechanic.
When hard times hit I took a job as a clerk in a store. I got the job because I could make change to customers without using the register to tell me. WE had to count from amount due to amount handed us back to the customer. It lessened the chances coming up short because both the customer and myself were counting. When the customer accepted it the money went in the till. There are high school grads who can do algebra but can not tell someone what 8X11= without a calculator. If algebra, geometry, etc had been required I would have been a drop out. I took basic math classes in high school. It's more than sufficed. I have nothing against higher level math courses for those with the aptitude and educational goals for a career requiring it. But a required subject for ones not? No.
In the 80’s, if we didn’t have Maxwell’s Eqns memorized in Differential/Integral format, then we were flunked out of the sophomore EE program.
I bumped into a recent grad who was just receiving his PE EE. I wrote down Maxwell’s Eqns from memory, after not having really looked at them for about 20 years, and left one negative sign out. I handed it to him to see if he could catch the error.
It is an exercise, I’ve discovered over the years, to expose those who fraudulently pretend to have EE credentials. It’s also a catharsis to celebrate the learning experience with fellow engineers.
He didn’t even know what the variables represented, let alone the mathematical expressions. I later read a blog discussing the value of Morse & Feshbach’s ‘Methods of Theoretical Physics’, only to discover many recent curricula for the BA/BS in Physics don’t even require partial diffEQ.
I’m incredulous how anybody can understand either EE or Physics without a grasp of these concepts in an intuitive fashion.
It makes me worry how much longer we’ll continue to have electrical power utilities with such ignorance.