Skip to main content

An Engineer's Apology..

Prelude - Hardy's 'A Mathematician's Apology'. A one-of-its-kind essay which gives a sneak peek into the mind of a mathematician.

Excerpts from the book:

"The function of a mathematician is to do something, to prove new theorems, to add to mathematics, and not to talk about what he or other mathematicians have done. .......there is no scorn more profound, or on the whole more justifiable, than that of the men who make for the men who explain. Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate minds.. "

"Good work is no done by ‘humble’ men. It is one of the first duties of a professor, for example, in any subject, to exaggerate a little both the importance of his subject and his own importance in it."

Mathematicians are a rare breed...an extremely gifted hashset of specimens endowed with an insatiable ego...They contribute more Mathematics, prove conjectures and add more theorems , not because they want them to be practically useful to the world, but because of the "intellectual curiosity, professional pride" they derive out of their research..Euler, one of Mathematics' greatest warriors, is known to have expelled a student from the university for having questioned him for the practical usefulness of a theorem..

One of the most elusive theoroms to be ever solved in Mathematics..the deceivingly simple Fermat's Last Theorem, was considered romantic and honored by the entire mathematical fraternity, not because proving it found an antidote to nuclear reactions, but because of the sensational pride associated with cracking a three-century-old riddle..Andrew Wiles finally proved the theorem after a decade of reclusive work...
And thus, mathematicians continue to live happily ever after....

Engineers on the other hand, solve equations for the sake of practical implications they have...While a mathematician judges a problem by its difficulty, an engineer judges it by its usefulness..And many a time, the supposed usefulness of the solution overshadows the beauty of the very problem that demands it...

Engineering is more sensibility than sense...To make things clearer, how many of us write beautiful code as against working code? And how would one define beauty in engineering? It is best left to the reader to answer that question..In my opinion, there is very little that an engineer can do with his aesthetic sense to satiate his voluptuous pride...

I am not apologizing on behalf of the engineering fraternity...Probably they have more practical reasons to be or not to be than any other exisiting ones...Am apologizing to the mathematical egotist hidden inside every engineer, who is denied a chance to surface in this engineering whirlpool...Warm Regards to thee....

PS - An equally controversial blog post...

Comments

Lakshmi said…
I can totally understand :)!
Subbu S said…
Working code? ya that reminds me of the time when I've to modify a perfectly working Cobol program where they named Variables A, B, C.. goes until Z & starts again like AA, AB, AC,.. Brilliant!

Everything has reason and a place & there is nothing to apologies
Tricky code for Geeks, Beautiful code for Academics, Maintainable codes for professionals and a just 'working code' for showing the importance of Maintainability :)
Ananth said…
The ability to produce beautiful mathematics is not a gift granted to every mathematician as is the ability to produce beautiful code.

Hardy laments here because all his life, he failed to produce anything beautiful or useful other than the discovery of Ramanujan, by his own admission. Probably a curse of his times where the wars required applied mathematics such as cryptography as opposed to abstract number theory.

Nevertheless, beauty in mathematics has an unfair advantage: The Colossus of Rhodes and the Library of Alexandria have long fallen. But the Prime Number Theorem and Euclid's Algorithm continue to linger in human consciousness.

Now, Software is more like the Colossus than the Prime Number Theorem. Only pedantic principles are eternally useful and the little beauty in those fundamental principles like say, self-balancing binary trees is lost because it is taught as something common place. Beauty in other facets of software is slowly destroyed by time. Which is why long standing design principles and systems (such as Unix) merit as much adulation as a Monet or a Picasso.

There is beauty all around in Software. And we are oblivious to it as we are to beauty in everything else until someone calls it beauty and stuffs it down our throats. In that sense, you might be interested in reading this book. (My favorite chapter of-course is "A Spoonful of Sewage").

The transient nature of beauty in our professions is worth bemoaning more than the lack of occasion to produce it. A hundred years from now, another Simon Singh might write a great romantic novel about how Don Knuth discovered the Dancing Links Algorithm and how beautifully it solves the exact cover problem. Maybe then, you will find peace with your profession ;-)
Unknown said…
I certainly was of your opinion about engineers solving equation for sake of practical implications. But practical and personal experience would allow me to say otherwise. You might get to talk and praise about the number of theorem's, but every theorem was written for solving a practical or say an engineering problem. There can be no engineering without maths and also vice versa. This might be a bold statement but it is so. The fact is we just know the tip of the ice berg of what the theorem is and the solution, a bit of research into why such a problem on the first hand, would probably lead to an engineering background more often than not.
-nash
@Ananth

As I said in the post, it is best left to the reader to discern what beautiful code means..IMO, science or Maths is more beautiful because of its intrinsic uselessness ..you can do justice to the problem than the solution.

@Nash

I'd agree with you partially, but not totally. Not all math problems have an engineering background, there are exceptions, and those exceptions makes Math more beautiful...
changingMind said…
hi, read your posts. good read. wud you like to write on engineering education too?? check out my site www.menteeworld.com, and read the blogs
http://menteeworld.com/blogs/view_blog.php?blog=vinayak
this is the link to my blog.

Thanks
Vinayak
asicengineer said…
Hi,
Till date, i always thought that math was the language of the universe. So, some of the proven theorems which don't find any use right now, will probably find use much later. As always, physics banks on such unique solutions. Without Hamiltonial matrix, there is no quantum mechanics, but its importance wouldn't have been realized when it was first postulated.

Popular posts from this blog

Enchante, Mumbai!

  It has been roughly nine years since we landed in the city of dreams - the two of us with a one big suitcase each and one kid half-the size of a case. We walked into an empty apartment on the twelfth floor of a building on a hot June afternoon, physically exhausted, yet high in spirits (Age had not withered us then). Strangely, I seem to remember how the first day in Mumbai unfolded with a lot of detail - insignificant things like the first dress I wore in Mumbai, first road-side sandwich , the first shopping experience in the very Mumbai-sh "DMart", the first person I heard speaking in Tamil in a rather foreign place, the first maid I employed(who promptly quit on me), and of course, the first meal that we ordered (in a non-Swiggy era). Jhumpa Lahiri, in her Pulitzer winning collection "Interpreter of Maladies",  insinuates through one of her characters, who reminisces about his first day in America with a new wife - about how bizarre it is that the mundane first

Thillana Mohanambal.....

Here's some plain speaking ...I stay at Bangalore and yet I've never been any good with movies or with catching up with the latest releases. I can never be dedicated to any task for more than a few minutes, and being glued to the silver screen for two-and-a-half or three hours is not, in many cases, an exception. I do have quite a few English favorites though (This is affectionately called the UK effect by some of my team-mates). Given a choice, I would prefer the Tamil oldies to the latest Hindi or the regional masalas . And speaking of Tamil oldies, the one film that pops up in my mind is this evergreen classic Thillana Mohanambal .. It is truly a classic..not only because it is set in the early to mid nineteenth century or because it is of Eastman colour..but also because generations after generations, people (children and adults alike) have found pleasure in every scene of the movie..I've watched the movie a zillion times before and I can play the entire movie in my

Probability is God!!!

If you agree with this rather audacious claim, then you are either too wise to be reading this blog post or, you have probably read God's Debris and with the wisdom of common sense, you are willing to ponder about this statement, and its equally contentious converse - God is Probability!!! I am, as you may have guessed with my previous posts, not too wise. I happened to read God's Debris , and I happen to be common-sensical , and I coined these propositions. Here is the inductional hypothetical base upon which I try to prove these.. Probability is based on the law of averages . The probability of getting a head while tossing a coin is (1/2). Does it mean that when you toss a coin twice, you are guaranteed to get head once and a tail once? Not really!!! It means that when you toss a coin 100 times, you are likely to get heads 50 times and tails 50 times, and when you toss the same Godforbidden coin 1000 times, you are more likely to get heads 500 times and tails 500 times. P