<p>I’ve heard the biomedical and environmental. I also heard civil uses a LOT of math. I’m not positive though. All fields of engineering require some sort of math. That is why I am going into engineering.</p>
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<p>Mainly intelligent pockets of swamp gas.</p>
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<p>Was the engineering/math history class taught by an actual engineer, or a disgruntled historian who could never get past calculus? Because as I recall, 2009 minus 1850 is about 159 years, during which engineers have used math to invent things like the integrated circuit, finite element methods, magnetohydrodynamics, and sliced bread. You’ve gotta know math. It’s one of those things that’s painful, but that you have to get through.</p>
<p>If your uncle doesn’t use math to design his buildings, then I really don’t want to go near any of them, because I use a lot of math to design my buildings. My buildings are all still standing, incidentally. Some of them are standing in Malibu. A couple more are standing in Los Angeles. I’ve seen some buildings that didn’t use math, and they fell down rather spectacularly. I actually used to make a career out of using math to show why other designers’ lack of math caused the buildings they designed to fall down. One of my buildings that I designed is about to stand about twenty stories up in the air in Houston, and it will hold millions of babies. So not only is math important, but it also saves the lives of babies.</p>
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<p>Some civil uses a lot of math. Structural definitely uses a lot of math. Arguing with City officials as to why you can indeed put a sanitary sewer where they illogically believe that you cannot put a sanitary sewer does <em>not</em> use math. So a lot of it depends upon what you do with your civil degree.</p>
<p>Oh, and PS: 1/3(t^3)+C</p>
<p>aibarr, you’re right. It does depend on the area of civil… thanks for clarifying that.</p>
<p>I’m a civil student in my senior year, so far knowing how to use equations, computer software, codes, and common sense is far more important than knowing actual math theories behind them. But, I do know advance structural design requires finite element and non linear analysis, which demands a lot of math.
my vote goes to transportation engineer and industrial engineer for least math used.</p>
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<p>Birdeye, how can this be? You say on another thread that you are 22 year old, recent college grad who can’t decide whether to move home or what. Have you REALLY been an engineer since you were 18 years old? Come on!!</p>
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<p>It may be the case that you can get a degree in industrial engineering without learning a lot of mathematics, but I hear that the discipline concerns itself a lot with probability and modeling.</p>
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<p>■■■■■ alert!</p>
<p>“industrial engineer for least math used.”</p>
<p>If you dont mind I ask… What are you smoking?</p>
<p>IE is basically an applied math degree. Stochastics… modelling… LP… IP…probability…stats… The only exception is if you specialize in ergonomics… but that’s like 2 out of 10 IE students. Otherwise, IE has the most math…just not the conventional calculus.</p>
<p>biomedical is more than you think:
calc 1, 2, 3
linear algebra
differential equations
probability and statistics</p>
<p>Hmm, I better strt studying the hell out of all areas of math if I’m to have any hope as a Bioengineer.</p>
<p>Those are just the core math courses for ANY type of engineering major.</p>
<p>Look into Engineering Technology… It is more “hands on” and less theory than your normal engineering degree… A lot less math involved. I am currently in school for Mechanical Engineering Technology.</p>
<p>Jspencer and Elvy: there are of course all kinds of people with various levels of mathematical ability who want to study engineering, but I would think twice about entering this field if your chief concern from the outset is how to avoid math and physics, that is not a good sign. If you are truly interested in the practical aspects of how things work, you might better consider a technology degree, although even then I would not downplay the math and science content, not to mention heavy study requirements in general.
BirdEye: I of course don’t know your background, but I can tell you bluntly that you have some serious misunderstandings about the math competency requirements and work content of practicing engineers. Simply “putting some numbers into a computer” and accepting the results is kind of the professional equivalent of playing Russian Roulette. Even your characterization of historical engineering practice, while there is some truth to it in some cases, is way oversimplified; if you really investigated the matter you would find that even going way back, design eingineers had a far better understanding of the physics behind what they did than what you give them credit for.</p>
<p>Let’s put it this way: if you hate math, you shouldn’t be doing engineering in the first place. In civil engineering, the math that a practicing engineer applies (in most cases) can range from zero to college-level math. There are exceptions of course, but this is the case mostly. Math is not everything in civil engineering - you need to know design, some basic engineering knowledge in statics (maybe dynamics), materials (steel, concrete, wood), etc. But nothing too difficult.</p>
<p>Computer programs are plain wrong occasionally, too. Our firm is working for a bigger company right now, analyzing the failure of a fairly good-sized structure. Two different programs were used for some of the analysis, with very different results! Most of the time, it’s a matter of “garbage in, garbage out,” but it appears that that is not the case here. So we’ll have to actually use math (gasp) to figure out where the discrepancy is. We’ll also use a third program to give us more information.</p>
<p>It makes us nervous when we see young engineers place a lot of blind faith in computer results! Not a good idea.</p>
<p>“My uncle a Civil engineer doesn’t even know how to take the integral of t^2 any more”</p>
<p>roflcopter</p>
<p>I agree with kwlmy in the post second post above</p>
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<p>You… haven’t gotten too far into civil engineering, have you?</p>
<p>The field can be as difficult as you care for it to be, and just be careful about making the assumption that “someone said civil engineering is easy!” and “civil engineers build skyscrapers!” means “I don’t have to learn difficult things and I will be able to build skyscrapers for a living!”… I know a lot of people who kind of stumbled into that, and ended up having to do a lot more math than they’d expected, or ended up designing sewer connections to big-box pharmacies for a living.</p>
<p>When you guys say such and such a field requires math, are you talking about Calculus/Differential Equations, or subjects like Real and Complex Analysis and Differential geometry etc?</p>
<p>we are talking about + - * ÷</p>
<p>lol @ silence_kit</p>