What's harder? Math, Physics or Engineering?

[Jin314159]

A friend of mine got into a heated debate on which one of these disciplines is harder. What do you guys think?

 

[Gokul43201]

Perhaps you should ask Math is Hard !

 

[Jin314159]

Perhaps you should ask Math is Hard !

Ha! I actually think math is the easiest out of the three. What makes math easy is that it's very well-defined. Yes, the ideas are deep and complicated but you call always fall back on the clean definitions to work your way through. But again, this is based only on my experience.

In physics, it seems like people make up stuff as they go along. For example, the whole concept of a quantum tunnel seems bogus to me. The whole wave-duality nature of light is also a bit discerning. They don't seem very "well-defined" to me.

As for engineering, I can't really comment but I would imagine it requires a lot of creativity.

 

[Math Is Hard]

ha ha ha! It's funny because I used to be frightened of math and science courses because I was so worried my calculations would be off the mark. Now what scares me more are the humanities classes because the grading can be very subjective, and sometimes it all boils down to how much your conclusions agree with the teacher's opinions. With math and science, you either get the right answer or you don't. With humanities and social science, it's more of a gray area.

 

[Gokul43201]

In physics, it seems like people make up stuff as they go along. For example, the whole concept of a quantum tunnel seems bogus to me.

Perhaps it seems bogus to you because you have not learned all the math bahind it, nor understood the relevance of the experimental evidence for this phenomenon.

I got my Undergrad Degree in Engineering. I'm doing my PhD. in Physics. And I spend my spare time learning Math.

LOSER ?

 

[Math Is Hard]

I got my Undergrad Degree in Engineering. I'm doing my PhD. in Physics. And I spend my spare time learning Math.

LOSER ?

Au contraire! A renaissance man!
What are you going to do with all that knowledge, Gokul? Teach? Research?

 

[Euphoriet]

Gokul, that seems like a smart thing to do since it seems that an engineering degree is overlooked ... when it is compared to a physics degree even in the engineering world =-/

 

[Jin314159]

ha ha ha! It's funny because I used to be frightened of math and science courses because I was so worried my calculations would be off the mark. Now what scares me more are the humanities classes because the grading can be very subjective, and sometimes it all boils down to how much your conclusions agree with the teacher's opinions. With math and science, you either get the right answer or you don't. With humanities and social science, it's more of a gray area.

What? Humanities are insanely easy.

You're right. Your grade is dependant on how much you agree with the professor's opinion (being the egotistical jerks they are). My advice is to just go to class and listen to what the professors say (you don't even have to read the selected material). Then when papers are due, just regurgitate what the professors said in class, sprinkled with a few of your own ideas and analysis. The secret here is to disguise their ideas as your own. Then, as the professors are reading your paper, they'll love it because it's their own ideas. They'll eat it up and ask for seconds.

 

[Chrono]

Wouldn't math be the hardest since physics and engineering both depend on it?

 

[Moonbear]

Wouldn't math be the hardest since physics and engineering both depend on it?

Interesting. I was thinking of it the other way around. Math would be the easiest, because it's just math. Physics and engineering require knowing how to actually use that math for something else. Engineering requires using physics and math, and people's lives hang in the balance, sometimes literally, if the engineers make a calculation mistake.

I used to make a similar argument about physics, chemistry and biology. I always said biology is the hardest. See, the physics majors just had to learn physics. The chemistry majors had to learn physics and chemistry. The biology majors were required to learn physics, chemistry and biology. So, by that reasoning, I thought biology must be the hardest

 

[Chrono]

Interesting. I was thinking of it the other way around. Math would be the easiest, because it's just math. Physics and engineering require knowing how to actually use that math for something else. Engineering requires using physics and math, and people's lives hang in the balance, sometimes literally, if the engineers make a calculation mistake.

Good point, you're probably right.

 

[Ivan Seeking]

It all depends on the person. I knew people who did well in math but who struggled more with physics or engineering classes. The opposite was true as well. It also depends on what fires a peson's interests. What I love in physics some might call too abstract, or even useless. What interests most engineers I find boring. As for mathematicians, they need to love the math for maths sake. Not everyone does. Note my quote by Feynman below. Though in the end I learned to love it also, for a long time for me, math was a means to an end - a necessary evil.

 

[eJavier]

My personal experience is that it depends on one's personal abilities (Aside from departments, schools, universities).

In Engineering they give you more [home]work, so you're stuck doing lots of stuff, some boring, some fun. The material ain't hard to understand. It's also important to be very methodic and neat about your calculations. To carry through with the calculations with great care.

You also have to make projects, that quite often take a lot of time.

In engineering you get prepared for real life work, so you have to do what people in real jobs do: make presentations, show before someone that your project will work and will adjust to the budget... etc.

In Maths you have more "free" time, but the material is harder to grasp, so might wind up studying one single theorem for hours and perhaps days to correctly understand it. In my faculty, mathematicians have 5-6 hours tests and sometimes they have to take them home. If you ain't inspired, you ain't going to find the solution.

In Physics they give you a lot of homeworks to do AND the material is hard to grasp. :-D

 

[Adam]

I find maths the hardest. I'm fine with pretty much everything else, but have lots of trouble with maths. I put this down to leaving school early, never studying it at all really, then heading back to education after the navy with no background in maths at all.

 

[loseyourname]

Interesting. I was thinking of it the other way around. Math would be the easiest, because it's just math. Physics and engineering require knowing how to actually use that math for something else. Engineering requires using physics and math, and people's lives hang in the balance, sometimes literally, if the engineers make a calculation mistake.

I used to make a similar argument about physics, chemistry and biology. I always said biology is the hardest. See, the physics majors just had to learn physics. The chemistry majors had to learn physics and chemistry. The biology majors were required to learn physics, chemistry and biology. So, by that reasoning, I thought biology must be the hardest

I think one thing you are overlooking here is that mathematicians learn a lot more math, and more advanced and complicated math, than do the physicists and engineers. By the same token, physicists learn more physics than chemists, and chemists learn more chemistry than biologists. I still agree that biology is the hardest, though. There's just so much frickin' fact memorization. Don't get me wrong. I think it's terribly interesting, but I'm just not good at learning that way. All you need is a pen and paper and you can practice math and physics, even chemistry. You can't do that with much biology outside of bioinformatics. Probably why I loved studying genetics, and especially population genetics, so much.

 

[eJavier]

I think one thing you are overlooking here is that mathematicians learn a lot more math, and more advanced and complicated math, than do the physicists and engineers. By the same token, physicists learn more physics than chemists, and chemists learn more chemistry than biologists. I still agree that biology is the hardest, though. There's just so much frickin' fact memorization. Don't get me wrong. I think it's terribly interesting, but I'm just not good at learning that way. All you need is a pen and paper and you can practice math and physics, even chemistry. You can't do that with much biology outside of bioinformatics. Probably why I loved studying genetics, and especially population genetics, so much.

You're correct, furthermore, we Engineers and Mathematicians are focused on different things, even when studying the same topic. Generally speaking, the engineer ain't that interested in the theory, he just wants to know how to solve something, with the mathematicians is the other way around.

Evidently, if you want to study something more deeply, you're going to end up studying the theory as well

 

[balkan]

your definition of engineers seems to be greately different from what it is in my country...
here, it is a phd. + basically... except for civil engineers in the soft branches like architechture and design...
other than that, engineers get a phd. degree (and can advance), plus they get practical skills and field work, where the regular phys and chem phd's are almost strictly theoretical educations...
thus, engineers are considered to have more allround skills that regular phd's and are more abt to getting a job, even in research... so slowly almost every regular science phd. is slowly being transformed into an engineering education...

anyway... i definitely don't consider biology to be the hardest... what's most hard about it is, that they have to learn an incredible amount of names for all sorts of things... but in reality they don't get much physics nor chemistry... it's mostly about function and how to manipulate... some of our 9-10 semester guidance councellors are from biotech and they really don't know **** about any quantum physical concept, and they're terrible at math... they do know quite a lot of chemistry though, allthough it's very specific subjects...

i'm studying to be an engineer in nanotech myself (which would give me a phd in that major) and i can easily compare my study with the other ones and say that nanotech people got probably the hardest education, maybe save for nuclear physicists...
we have to learn classical physics of course, but we get more nuclear and quantum physics than the physics phd's, plus we have to learn biotechnology, medico and chemistry so that we can work in more than one field simultaneously... this is simply because it is neccessary. when you work like we do in nanotechnology, it's about creating and changing molecules and switching out atoms in same, which is more deep down than regular biotech and chemistry... we have to know how to insert mutations in dna chains using pcr just like biotech students, but we also have to learn how to calculate energy states of electrons in tiny molecules and structures, and the list goes on...
we have ridiculously more classes than any other existing education, but that doesn't mean the requirements for our projects are any smaller... we have had a 15% drop out percentage each semester due to the high demands... people flee to biotech where they won't have to learn deeply involved quantum mechanics or to physics where they don't have to learn deeply involved biotech...
it's pretty freaky...
but on the other hand, we get alot of funding and a lot of benefits that other educations don't have...

 

[The Bob]

They are all just has easy and as hard as each other. I find physics and maths hard but have never done engineering. It also depensd on the person. This thread is completely option-based so is going to go in circles a lot.

The Bob (2004 ©)

 

[balkan]

They are all just has easy and as hard as each other. I find physics and maths hard but have never done engineering. It also depensd on the person. This thread is completely option-based so is going to go in circles a lot.
The Bob (2004 ©)

yeah, but if you consider the requirements of the education, it's a different situation... what an individual considers to be hard is one thing, but then there are requirements, amount of work and the number of different fields...
btw, math is mostly a tool imo... and physicists have often been the inventors of new mathemathical ideas...
of course deep math is insanely hard, but the people doing it are 1) crazy about math 2) very good at it... and the same can be said about other fields...
so i think it's about the amount of work, the number of different fields and the degree of deepness into these fields...

 

[ElectroPhysics]

Engineering is easy due to its practical nature. Physics is a little bit difficult as there are less "chances" to apply it. Math is difficult as it can't be applied at lower levels. It depends much on the nature of your job in practical life. U r fortunate if your work involves all of these areas.

 

[balkan]

Engineering is easy due to its practical nature.

what is the definition of an engineer in your country? (asking because I'm interested... there seems to be a great difference compared to here...)

 

[Kalimaa23]

At the end of the year I'll have both my undergraduate degree in physics & mathematics, and I have a couple of friends who are in engineering, so allow me to comment.

Firstly, we need to get our definitions straight, so I'll explain what I mean by engineer.

In Belgium, there are two grades of engineering. One is called industrial or technical engineer, which is basically and undergraduate degree that is awarded at a "Hogeschool" (ie. an institution of higher education that does not award phd's). We will not consider those. On the other hand you have civil engineers, which is the equivalent of a master's degree. This can only be done at a university.

Between mathematics and physics, I'd say physics is harder. In the end, you may end up knowing as much mathematics as any math major. Math is harder in the beginning, when in physics you do only baby-problems in mechanics and elektricity, you have to tackle some difficult & rigorous courses. HOWEVER, when you get used to the rigour, the challenge is gone.

In physics, things get harder as you progress. When you get to things like quantummechanics, you see that it is often a question of "Vingerspitzengefühl", ie knowing where to calculate what, or when to approximate, or when to use a certain physical property to make life more easy.

In my experience, most physics majors, after their first year when they get used to the math, can do just as well on the pure math courses then any of the math majors. The opposite, sadly, is not true. Most math majors I know really struggle with their physics courses.

Most engineers I know, grudgingly, admit the math/physics is harder. Our level of rigour and abstraction drives them insane, while a physicist can hold his own in more the practical applications that they're used to.

 

[ElectroPhysics]

what is the definition of an engineer in your country? (asking because I'm interested... there seems to be a great difference compared to here...)

Yes, there will definately be a difference. We have to work and learn with different constraints. Otherwise, as long as engineering is concernd, the educational courses and there duration is the same as yours. Many instructors are foreign qualified and they normaly teach in the same pattern as they have learnd abroad.

 

[Adam]

All engineering courses here do 50% more work than any other degree. Why? For some reason, all units in other degrees are worth 6 points, and our Engineering faculty is still on 4 points per unit. Thus, to have a full workload of 24 units, Eng. students must do 6 units per semester, while anyone else can do 4 units per semester. We take our subjects from the Maths faculty, Science, and of course Engineering. My degree in particular is quite difficult. Last year at the mid-year graduation, only 12 students from nearly 400 managed to complete the degree.

 

[Shahil]

I actually had the same maths/physics/engineering argument and won it by saying engineering is the worst! However, I kinda based it on what we do at my varsity.

What I've observed is that the maths/physics degrees on campus require less subjects and (importantly) the tutorial sessions in these fields are compulsory ie. you HAVE to do ALL your work set and get it checked by lecturers to see if it's right. In my 2 years of engineering, I've NEVER done proper work in a tutorial (neither has 80% of my class) and we still PASS! Why? My theory is that the faculties know something we don't. Whereas in Maths/Physics, you have to be nurtured in undergrad so as to produce marvellous postgrad work, engineering requires you to be able to be able to just make it through know matter what.

I was also thinking that prob what makes engineering terrificly more difficult is that you know that you are going to be screwed over right till the end of your degree. I've seen top[ students crack and hence leave engineering even though they are super-brilliant whereas my physics/maths friends are happily going about their degrees.

Maybe I'm biased but HEY, I'm doing engineering after all!

 

[quantumdude]

A friend of mine got into a heated debate on which one of these disciplines is harder. What do you guys think?

I think that pure mathematics is the hardest, hands down. A lot of people who say "Aw, math is easy!" probably never took a "real" math course. By that I mean that they probably never went beyond the calculus/linear algebra/diff eq sequence required of engineering majors. Once you get away from those grind-out-the-calculations courses, you get into the real meat of the issue: proving theorems. This required more mental firepower than any other discipline, IMO. As a physics student, I did just enough to be dangerous . My plan is to get myself up to the level of a math grad student in analysis and algebra, starting this fall. Wish me luck.

 

[Gokul43201]

One of the things that make math and physics hard, are the existence of abstract concepts that can NOT be visualized or understood in terms of more familiar things.

 

[BobG]

ha ha ha! It's funny because I used to be frightened of math and science courses because I was so worried my calculations would be off the mark. Now what scares me more are the humanities classes because the grading can be very subjective, and sometimes it all boils down to how much your conclusions agree with the teacher's opinions. With math and science, you either get the right answer or you don't. With humanities and social science, it's more of a gray area.

There's a reason for that. When you write a paper supporting your own beliefs, you tend to rely on some assumptions that seem like common sense to you. Unfortunately, people on the opposite side of the fence may not believe in those same assumptions.

If you're lucky, the teacher's opinions are based on the same assumptions as yours and don't need supporting (i.e. - the teacher can fall into the same trap as the writer). If you're unlucky, the teacher won't let those assumptions pass without support and will see your arguments as weak.

The best route is to always support the opposite side in the papers you write. You can see the weaknesses in your opponents' assumptions easier than you can see the weaknesses in your own and are less likely to base your arguments on weak assumptions.

(Assuming, of course, that your goal is to get a good grade vs. change the world)

 

[Artman]

Personally, I find math the hardest. I've been doing engineering without a degree for twenty years now. I've gone back to school to earn my degree and the math is the most difficult subject to overcome.

That being said, Engineering is the most important of the three. Engineering is the discipline where the money is applied to the knowledge. A mistake in the engineer's use of math or physics can cost a great deal of money, or lives.

 

[Math Is Hard]

The best route is to always support the opposite side in the papers you write. You can see the weaknesses in your opponents' assumptions easier than you can see the weaknesses in your own and are less likely to base your arguments on weak assumptions.

(Assuming, of course, that your goal is to get a good grade vs. change the world)

Actually, my strategy is to make sure my teacher and I have a certain amount of compatibility. For example, recently I was randomly assigned to a composition class and as soon as I found out the teacher's name I went and looked up her bio and assigned booklist. She is a graduate student doing a thesis on themes in literature involving incarcerated black lesbians. The book she assigned for the class is one such story. I am sure this teacher is a delightful and brilliant person and I would probably love hanging out with her in a social setting. However, as a heterosexual, caucasion female (who is probably 10-12 years older than her), I doubt my analysis of these topics would impress her. My background and experience is just too different from hers, and anything I wrote would probably strike her as trite or missing the point.
I opted to switch my class to another section with a different teacher where the book list is more traditional (Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, etc.) and more along the lines of my tastes. I know I'll feel more secure in this course section.

 

[Kalimaa23]

I think that pure mathematics is the hardest, hands down. A lot of people who say "Aw, math is easy!" probably never took a "real" math course. By that I mean that they probably never went beyond the calculus/linear algebra/diff eq sequence required of engineering majors. Once you get away from those grind-out-the-calculations courses, you get into the real meat of the issue: proving theorems.

Well, you get a lot of that as a physics undergraduate as well in this country. The idea is that if you're going to use mathematics, you might as well learn the theory behind it. So every physics student tags along with the mathematicians and gets algebra, analysis, etc... courses that are aimed at math students, so with no practical applications in mind whatsoever. You know, that kind of course that goes : axiom-theorem-proof-theorem-proof-lemma-theorem-proof-lemma-lemma-lemma-theorem-proof, etc...

It is tough at first, but once you get used to it, math becomes a whole lot less difficult. I still hold that physics is harder.

 

[selfAdjoint]

Learning undergraduate math, even the abstract kind is heavy on memorization, and I suppose easier than undergraduate physics with all those calculations. But doing math; i.e. thinking up new theorems, is harder than almost anything, and I believe there are fewer clues than in physics to help you along.

 

[Sting]

Asking which subject is harder depends on who you are asking.

What is "harder" is purely subjective. Person A might find math a lot harder than physics and Person B might find physics a lot harder than math.

I concur with Tom. A lot of people think math is limited to introductory calculus (which I find a joke) and differential equations. Most people fail to note specializations like Real Analysis, Complex Analysis, and Topology which are not simply "plug in and turn the mathematical crank." Those are subjects with a basis in proof writing.