MathHorrorStories

re: GirlVsCalculator


I've been keeping a collection of math horror stories for awhile now. (So please! Send yours!)

I got started on this little edu-sideline thanks to a friend of mine who's married to an architectural engineer.

In grad school, she said, he would do pages and pages of calculations by hand, in teeny-tiny little print.

These sheets would come back to him from his professor with equally tiny little red-pencil corrections scattered across the page.

So today her husband is hiring students fresh out of grad school to work for him. These are grad students; they have MAs in architectural engineering.

None of them does calculations by hand, ever. They use architectural engineering software.

They'll bring in printouts of their work for him, and he'll look at it, spot a bunch of errors, and say, 'This is wrong.'

They just stare at him.

They have no idea what he's talking about, or where or what the errors might be.

These are architectural engineers, folks.

They build stuff.

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Comments

I have my own story like this. About 10 years ago I was a working Aerospace Engineer. I was in charge of a project to do the conceptual design of a new transport aircraft. The using command for the Air Force wanted the aircraft to be able to land and takeoff in the length of a football field so obviously takeoff and landing were to be important in this design. In most transport aircraft we don't worry about takeoof and landing at the conceptual level because the air force has 15000 ft runways. Well I told a young engineer just out of college to write a program to do the take off and landing. When he was done he handed me the results for the first design and the takeoff time was 300 seconds. He saw nothing wrong with this since as he said "that's what the computer says it should be." I told him to go to his desk and come back in 300 seconds. Only then did it dawn on him that 5 minutes might be too long for a take off run.

-- KtmGuest - 08 Jun 2005

I encountered that a lot in classes. It scares me to think that the problem is so entrenched these days that it doesn't get worked out in aerospace engineering school.

And are you telling me you've retired? Hoo boy. Did you leave this kid in charge?

-- CarolynJohnston - 09 Jun 2005

Wait!

Wait!

I just realized:

AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

oh-my-god

-- CatherineJohnson - 09 Jun 2005