How would you rank the following the majors by the difficulty and prevalence of mathematics? Are there any other common college majors that involve significant amounts of math, or do any of those listed require negligible amounts of higher-level mathematics?
Astronomy
Biology
Chemistry
Chemical Engineering*
Civil Engineering*
Computer Science
Economics
Electrical Engineering*
Mechanical Engineering*
Neuroscience
Physics
*There are, of course, tons of other engineering majors, but most of them fit within one of these categories pretty well.
This should help.
Seriously, though, I’d think ME/Physics, EE, other E’s to use quite a bit of calc. CS to be more into theory & proofs. I hadn’t ever thought of the natural sciences as being math related, and econ (back in the day) was no more related to math (other than a patina of statistics) than English.
Economics can be at the very top of this list if you take lots of advanced math and statistics courses like real analysis, proof based linear algebra, and calculus based probability theory in preparation for PhD study. But it can also be at the very bottom of this list, where students take only a semester of calculus for business majors and a non calculus statistics course.
CS can also vary. Theory, cryptography, and graphics are very math heavy, while many other areas are less so.
Chemistry can be very math heavy (physical, some types of theoretical) or math light (organic).
Many social science fields use a lot of math that you wouldn’t first think of–at least some fields do all soc sci are math based.
I did EE and only covered up to Fourier and Laplace transforms. But it seems like my kid who is doing Computer science has to take more math classes and lots of proofs.
