As someone who has only checked up on this board maybe once or

>>8162632
It's a college thing.
Engineers are usually condescending fags that think their memorization and applied classes makes them more useful.

Physics thinks they know the answer to existence and everyone else are their tools. In reality they party a lot and get high.

Math students are autistic about their rigour.

This is amplified 1000x on an anonomous Anima board

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>>8162632
People who do math usually don't care about physics or engineering applications. If anything, we'd prefer never to see these applications, because it ruins the purity of the subject, there will be interest in a problem because it's useful rather than because it's interesting. Pic related.

>>8162632

To make meaningful contributions to math you must have the right kind of autism. If you don't have it you'll never be great. Even if their work is unintelligible to pretty much anyone but other mathematicians and useless by basically any standard, it is important that anyone capable of advancing math do so, simply because most people are not intellectually equipped for it. Math is it's own reward, although nothing stops one from cashing in on poker or the stock market.

To make a meaningful contribution to physics you need to learn about as much math as a professional mathematician then work your ass off trying to figure out a way to use some of the higher math you learned to model the real world. The best physicists are world class mathematicians and may even need to create new math branches to solve problems posed by the complex nature of reality. Even if you are not great you can still become a meme scientist if you are charismatic enough. There is a great risk of wasting your life working in an hypothesis that simply doesn't correspond to reality.

An engineer doesn't need to be particularly good at math, just skilled enough to apply well known math to specific problems for which the general solutions are already known. The prefered math learning strategy for engineers is learn by doing - just overload your brain with math problems until you start seeing the patterns. Society will always need engineers as most people are too lazy to do their own mathematical thinking. Even a failed engineer studied far more math models for reality than the average person will ever get in contact with and can apply those modelling and analytical skills to pretty much any field. You don't have to be particularly smart to be an engineer, although being smart certainly helps; just having an uncanny persistence and a positive attitude towards failure is usually enough. Those who succeed will be able to afford a confortable life for themselves and their wife's children.

>>8162633
most accurate thing I've read today

>>8162633
/thread

>>8162659
>To make a meaningful contribution to physics you need to learn about as much math as a professional mathematician

>The best physicists are world class mathematicians

You're gonna have to explain this. Only one physicist has ever won a fields medal. Mathematics becomes so abstract and obscure at the highest level that it doesn't even make sense to talk about a Physicist learning as much Math as a professional Mathematician. One of my professors, however, did solve some differential geometry problems in general relativity in her earliest work and she's a Mathematician.

>>8162670

advances in physics are shifts from less comprehensive to more comprehensive mathematical models, an innovative physicist needs to learn obscure and abstract math in order to make the leap of genius that will connect the obscure abstraction with reality to generate falsifiable predictions

>>8162632
Physics uses math and engineers use physics (and therefore math). I've found math and physics get along really well (I was a math major) because they tend to have really really similar personalities. Engineers and math/physics guys may sling some banter, but generally there isn't much hate after like freshman year (at my school a lot of engineers would come in thinking they were hot shit and had bad episodes, only to fail out and end up in some bullshit like sociology). The real difference is between STEM and liberal arts.

Maths
A branch of philosophy where you can prove things in the strictest sense.
Not connected to the physical world, in maths you make the rules of a system (the axioms) and see what you can prove with those rules (theorems, lemmas and corollaries).
Some branches of pure maths have no connection to the natural world, but having a "physical" or "engineering" intuition may help with some fields of maths (both pure and applied)... then there are some branches of maths which are so abstract, having good physical intuition may actually hinder you...

Physics
A branch of science which tries to explain the physical world (physicists ask why does it work?). Uses maths to vindicate models (and their underlying assumptions) by producing good predictions with experiments (within error of the measuring equipment). You can prove things mathematically, but you can never fully connect the physical world since there will always be some sort of error in the measurements (even if it's really small) and this fact separates it further with maths since we can never have an exact answer. For example, physicist will still accept classical mechanics at the "normal scale", even though it produces large erroneous results at very large distance (where you should be using general relativity) and at very small distances (where quantum mechanics should be applied). Since getting an exact answer is not necessary (as measurements in experiment will always have some level of error), asymptotic and/or close approximations are generally more accepted in physics (and applied maths) than pure maths.

>>8162702
continued
Engineering
Engineers are people who use available tools to make something (engineers ask how does it work or how can I make it work?). They can use physics and maths to help them design things or solve problems they are working on. Because they don't necessarily care about the "why" bit, they don't necessarily care about the underlying assumptions of models... as long as the model works well enough. Hence you'll see some engineers talk about things like centrifugal forces in ways that make pure physicists puke.

Every lab I've worked in had a good mixture of physicists and engineers... we get along well with each other (as well as mathematicians) and most would consider themselves a mixture of all three (only the students, postdocs and the younger staff would identify as one or the other)... in fact this is the only place where I've seen so many gay engineers jokes.

most of the people here are americans, and americans are kind of stupid

>>8162670
Fields medal was not awarded in Newton's times.