Career advice -- How much math for physics?

[Mwett]

Educational system in Belgium must be much different from Brazil. Here, students only get to see derivatives and integrals at college.

Tipically, last year in high school would cover complex numbers, probability and statistics, analytical geometry and combinatory analysis, with matrices, trigonometry, exponentials and logarithms being taught the year before.

I think we saw derivatives first because now with the exponentials and log we can prove whether those functions are "growing" (don't know the English word, climbing) or not, and calculate log and a^x derivatives.

 

[Mwett]

Yes, this seems very popular in the US. But it is almost unheard of in Belgium, as far as I'm aware. It's certainly not as popular here as in the US, and if it happens at all then it's just a minority.
So you'll have to contact different professors for this. But don't be surprised if they look at you funny.

Alright, I went to University of Technology Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where they had a research program.

 

[glaucousNoise]

are you a physical scientist micromass?

EDIT: also, to the OP: what exactly do you want to do? Cosmology? Quantum gravity? Topological materials? Theory or experiment?

The disciplines which use weird stuff like differential geometry, algebraic topology, or abstract algebra are all theory (to my knowledge) and constitute a teeny tiny minority of physics, although they have a disproportionately loud voice in the media. Studying quantum mechanics usually means "computational AMO physics/chemistry/condensed matter" these days aside from another teeny tiny minority.

For the typical physicist I stand by my remarks, and I'll buttress them by pointing out that the teeny tiny minorities I'm referring to are currently not in a mathematical bottleneck but rather an empirical bottleneck. Opinions about the utility of weird math perhaps should be held back until this empirical bottleneck is passed.

 

[Mwett]

I don't exactly know what I want to do yet.. That's why I'm on this forum.

 

[S.G. Janssens]

I don't exactly know what I want to do yet.. That's why I'm on this forum.

Given what you wrote so far, you could consider just giving physics a serious go. Mathematics is a tool (a beautiful tool, but still a tool) in physics and studying physics is quite a bit different from studying mathematics, certainly at the undergraduate (bachelor) level. Don't fear the required math, confront it, learn about it and exploit it in your physics courses.

If after a year you feel an adjacent field suits you more and the system in Belgium allows for relatively easy transitions (that is why I asked about that earlier), you can still make the switch at a later point. This is likely to be easier when you start with physics than when you start with chemistry, say. Incidentally, I didn't like mathematics too much in high school (saw it as a necessary evil) and started my bachelor in physics, only to discover a love for mathematics in the first year of university. Sometimes unexpected things happen, and starting with physics is a great way to cater for a broad interest in the sciences.

EDIT: If you feel you would like to strengthen your mathematics, I would perhaps read Micromass' recent "Insights" on the matter and ask him (I suppose) for advice. It's fortunate that you are both from Belgium.

 

[clope023]

Good evening,
I'm currently a high school student and I will have to make a decision for my studies very soon. I'm quite interested in physics and often watch documentaries / read books about it (especially about cosmology, quantum mechanics,...). But I wonder if the math wouldn't be too difficult for me if I chose to study in this field. I'm not especially bad at math but I'm not a genius either.
I am thus asking if some other studies involve physics but with less math.
Thanks already.PS: Sorry for my English. I'm from Belgium

You definitely don't need to be a genius neither do you need the mathematical maturity and rigor of a mathematician to do physics, but you will need to be competent at calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra as a bare minimum to do the major. Statistics also come into it when analyzing data from experiments and no one escapes computer programming; none of which is impossible and your skills (both at performing tasks and learning how to do them) can and will evolve and improve over time.

 

[Mwett]

You definitely don't need to be a genius neither do you need the mathematical maturity and rigor of a mathematician to do physics, but you will need to be competent at calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra as a bare minimum to do the major. Statistics also come into it when analyzing data from experiments and no one escapes computer programming; none of which is impossible and your skills (both at performing tasks and learning how to do them) can and will evolve and improve over time.

Thanks for this reassuring advice. I guess most of the stuff you named will be seen in high school and I won't have to do much more.

 

[Mwett]

If after a year you feel an adjacent field suits you more and the system in Belgium allows for relatively easy transitions (that is why I asked about that earlier), you can still make the switch at a later point.

I don't really know how that works, could I just go on with the second year chemistry ? thanks for the useful advice

 

[clope023]

Thanks for this reassuring advice. I guess most of the stuff you named will be seen in high school and I won't have to do much more.

I don't know how it is in Belgium (I'm American); but here people might see basic Calculus, Statistics, and Programming in high school but you'll be seeing the stuff at exponentially higher and higher levels in College.

 

[ModusPwnd]

There was zero programming in my physics program, both undergrad and graduate. Very little statistics, just a bit from stat mech. No t-tests, anovas, blocking or hypothesis testing.

 

[FactChecker]

well, I've taken quantum at the graduate level and work in computational quantum chemistry/biology among other things...

The big caveat you seem to be ignoring is whether or not what the OP wants to do ultimately connects to real world data. Sure, if you munge through Physical Review D or the Journal of Mathematical physics, you'll find many a paper which employs exotic math but which has nothing to do with real world data. Try the Journal of Chemical physics or Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation and you'll find far fewer such papers, which I think says quite a bit about the relative scientific quality of such journals.

I have worked on a quantum computer research program and I can say that everyone on the program was pretty darn good at math.

 

[clope023]

There was zero programming in my physics program, both undergrad and graduate. Very little statistics, just a bit from stat mech. No t-tests, anovas, blocking or hypothesis testing.

There was plenty of programming and statistics in mine, though I'll be the first to say it could've been more rigorous. We learned Python in Modern Physics laboratory, using it to perform error analysis on experimental data and generating statistics (histograms with binning appropriate to what the data should represent), least square curve fitting, chi square goodness of fit tests, Monte Carlo simulations in multiple dimensions, among other things. Apart from this there were programming projects given as homework for Plasma and Nuclear Physics; my partial differential equations course also offered an optional (for the undergrads, required for grads) component of solving PDE's in MATLAB. Me thinks thou dost project too much.

 

[S.G. Janssens]

I don't really know how that works, could I just go on with the second year chemistry ? thanks for the useful advice

Not exactly, I think it will require extra work which costs time, but not necessarily too much. It is something you have to consider carefully. In the Netherlands (where I'm from) it used to be quite feasible to switch, particularly at the end of the first semester of the bachelor, but even after the first year. During this part of their curricula, there is still a lot of overlap between different but adjacent bachelor programs.

What I would do if I were you, is send some emails to undergraduate study advisors of physics departments in universities that you are considering. Preferably also make appointments to meet them face to face. Explain your interests, but also your doubts. Ask them for study guides with the first year curricula of physics and, say, chemistry, compare these and ask about the possibilities to switch.

Another natural point to change your course of education comes after the bachelor. In Europe, it is most common to do a master after the bachelor, irrespective of whether or not the student wants to go for a PhD at the end. Again, physics is a good bachelor to have for this situation, since it may give you access to masters in e.g. chemistry and applied mathematics, but often not vice versa. The advantage of switching after the bachelor is that you often have a clearer idea about the direction of research that you would like to be involved in for your master thesis.

 

[FactChecker]

A great deal of math was motivated by physics. You may find that the physics you study will put the math in a context that will make it very intuitive and natural. There will be occasional math results that will be less intuitive or maybe even counter-intuitive. You should incorporate those results into a new intuition of the related physics.

 

[Mwett]

Not exactly, I think it will require extra work which costs time, but not necessarily too much. It is something you have to consider carefully. In the Netherlands (where I'm from) it used to be quite feasible to switch, particularly at the end of the first semester of the bachelor, but even after the first year. During this part of their curricula, there is still a lot of overlap between different but adjacent bachelor programs.

What I would do if I were you, is send some emails to undergraduate study advisors of physics departments in universities that you are considering. Preferably also make appointments to meet them face to face. Explain your interests, but also your doubts. Ask them for study guides with the first year curricula of physics and, say, chemistry, compare these and ask about the possibilities to switch.

Another natural point to change your course of education comes after the bachelor. In Europe, it is most common to do a master after the bachelor, irrespective of whether or not the student wants to go for a PhD at the end. Again, physics is a good bachelor to have for this situation, since it may give you access to masters in e.g. chemistry and applied mathematics, but often not vice versa. The advantage of switching after the bachelor is that you often have a clearer idea about the direction of research that you would like to be involved in for your master thesis.

Thanks, think I'll do that.

 

[ModusPwnd]

Me thinks thou dost project too much.

I didn't project anything... I just described my experience. You are the one who claimed he would see that stuff. I am telling you I never did.

 

[StatGuy2000]

There was zero programming in my physics program, both undergrad and graduate. Very little statistics, just a bit from stat mech. No t-tests, anovas, blocking or hypothesis testing.

Pardon me, but how can anyone graduate with a BS in physics without having to do at least some programming at some level? The physics students that I knew in my old alma mater (University of Toronto) all had to work with programming in their Practical Physics courses (i.e. lab courses) to analyze experimental data (from what I understand, these programming exercises were done in MATLAB, and many of my physics friends all took introductory CS courses as electives). I don't mean this to offend you, but it makes me wonder about the quality of your school or the physics department you were associated with.

[As an aside, I do agree that physics programs do not teach much statistics at all in their programs except for a little probability theory from statistical mechanics, although my understanding (which could be mistaken) is that at my alma mater, very simple t-tests and ANOVAs are often incorporated in the lab courses as part of analyzing experimental data.]

 

[AnnaD]

Salut Mwett! I'm 18 and I've been struggling with the same dilemma! Your posts really helped me thanks a lot, wish you good luck

 

[Mwett]

Hi Anna, what did you chose finally ? :)

 

[SoylentBlue]

The biggest mistake I made in high school was not taking calc. I was solid in trig and reasonably solid in algebra, but didn't meet calc until first semester as an undergrad. My advice, for whatever it is worth: be as fluent as possible in calc, and certainly keep your trig and algebra skills up to par. Don't fear the math; embrace it. It is just a tool.
You don't have to be a genius. You just have to be motivated and work hard.
Also: talk to profs, talk to other students, see who is doing what and you'll get a good taste of what your career might be like.
Also: get the books ahead of time and start reading. Now that we have the magic of the Internet, you can watch, ahead of time, videos of the lectures you'll be exposed to. Youtube is an amazing tool!
Also: don't feel pressured, during the first or even 2nd year as an undergrad, to choose your direction. Most majors share a base of common courses, so you'll be able to shift your emphasis without losing too much (or maybe any) time.
Also...man, I could go on forever. I wish I had it all to do all over again. So many things I would have done differently. I could write a book about this. Hmmm...maybe I will. Anyway, good luck to you...Keep us posted.

 

[Hellmut1956]

I am on the other side of the professional life from you who is thinking about what to study. At high school, in german Gymnasium, I finished mathematics with nearly the best rate possible. I also was and have always been a physics enthusiast. Nevertheless I decided to go for mechanical engineering in the late 70, which was a mistake. Many of my fellow students have spend their time to then working on a car or motorcycle, what I never did.
Now I had decided to do dedicate my time to naval modeling as a vehicle to organize my life, to have a positive motivation and to dig into the fields I was going to touch. I am working on my sailboat model from scratch since more than a decade. About 2 years ago I decided to apply the design by modeling technology to design, model and optimize the design of my own method to implement a sheet control system. So soon I decided to organize my partial knowledge of the fields involved in my modeling objective. Electronics, even having been an application engineer of one of the largest US semiconductor companies, analog electronics was alien to me. I went to the university here in Munich and was warmly welcomed and got access to all the material, even their intranet. Soon I realized without updating my mathematical skills it would not even be worth to dig into the electronics courses. Linear algebra and Analysis proved to be the starting challenges i would have to dedicate my efforts to. Another field relevant for my objective is physics, as my sailboat would have the physical environment to be most relevant to model the operation of the sheet control system. Here I found out the same without mathematics and without Linear Algebra and Analysis to start with, worthless to dig into the topic. But also electronics demands physics.
As part of the investigation I did I found the Moocs offerings from german, english (USA) and spanish a language I am a native speaker of. Soon I found out that I was able to choose the professor whose teaching style best fit to me. But if you look at the offering from the MIT, from edX, Coursera to name a few I glanced into related courses and was fascinated. So my decision to engage into my building o a sailboat model had brought me to a fantastic source of learning. But for all those courses, and calculus of single and multi variables adds to the Linear Algebra and Analysis. But I have come to the conclusion that without getting mathematical skills to a level where I could understand and think mathematically I would just be like an analfabet or legasthenic person. So I named myself a mathematical analfabet and/or legasthenic. Mathematics is really the only "language" in which you need to be able to think and speak, to really deal with any study this days. Prof Keith Devlin offers a great Mooc course about "Introduction to Mathematical Thinking" in which he also speaks about what is the difference between high school mathematics and that you face in colleges. In 1978 i decided that I was not able to learn to speak, think and work with the language mathematics and that was the reason I decided to go for mechanical engineering. Sadly mathematics in the study for becoming a mechanical engineering career is even farther away from what Keith Devlin calls mathematical thinking and even from the way I did mathematics at high school. Just many years later I understood the justification for it. Engineers have to recognize to what basic mathematics equation a problem can be modified to to fit and then apply the "cook book" solution! I did solve all the the exams questions, but understanding them and did not modify it to fit a style where a cook book solution could be applied. So even having all solutions right I barely passed the exams as many of the in between steps were not touched.
Why I am giving this extensive response? Because if you love physics and you are able to learn and apply mathematical thinking this is the right course to follow. Nearls any course this day requires you to apply mathematics. So the challenge is kind of the same in any science or engineering field, while in physics and mathematics you have one extreme of the goal of learning the language mathematics, while in engineering you are more on the range of learning to do and apply mathematics. But to excel this days I believe you have to learn mathematical thinking. Now mid of 2015 I believe you can study upfront to gain the skills in mathematics to then have a much easier run when you register at a university. I can only tell you that having found out for me that I have found Moocs from professors whose style fit to me I enjoy mathematics. So I have decided to refresh my mathematical skills learning Calculus for single and multi variables by using the course for calculus from the MIT in their OpenCourseWare offering, same applies for Linear Algebra and to study Analysis from the Mooc offering of a german university who builds its course based on the Analysis Course of Terence Tao, Analysis with honours and where his 2 books can be legally downloaded from his personal website.

 

[Mwett]

Juste another question, what job could a physicist get ? And what difference with an engineering's job ?
I'd rather study physics but my father would prefer I became an engineer. So I need some arguments here..

 

[Hellmut1956]

I used to work for large US semiconductor companies. Physics come with a solid mathematical and physics skill set and have learned with those skills to solve tasks. This ability qualifies you for many jobs in the industry! Besides that, once you start your career live gets you to places and jobs you could not have about thought about before! With technology developing so fast requirements needed tomorrow do not exist yet, but a solid skill set will make you able to deal with new tasks. But overall I dare to say is one aspect that is key! If you like what you do, if you feel passion for it, you will be good! Does not matter what it is!

 

[Chronos]

When I was at uni [back in the dard ages] all the necessary math skills were either pre or corequisite for physics courses, depending on level of application involved. I assume that situation has not changed substantially. So looking at the math required for physics electives in your field of choice will give you a good idea of what is necessary. Keep in mind these are just minimum requirements and remain open to the prospect of picking up additional math electives appropriate to your field of choice. Making the transition from a degree in physics to engineering is usually fairly trivial and the technical demands are less rigorous. At worst it might take an extra year to complete your engineering degree. A double al major in physics/engineering will significantly enhance your employment prospects.