A common trope about mathematicians vs. other math users is that mathematicians are paranoid persnickety truth-seekers, they want everything to be exactly correct down to every detail. Thus engineers and physicists often perceive mathematicians as a sort of fact-checker caste.
As you say, in some sense mathematicians deal with made-up stuff and engineers with real stuff. But from the engineer’s point of view, they deal with mathematicians when writing math, not when screwing bolts, and so perceive mathematicians as “the annoying people who want everything to be perfectly correct”.
Example: I write “E[E[X|Y]] = E[X]” in a paper, and the mathematician pops up complaining “What’s the measure space? Is it sigma-finite? You have to declare if your random variables are square-integrable. Are X and Y measureable in the same space?” and my reply would be “come on we know it’s true I don’t care about writing it properly”.
So to me and many people in STEM your analogy has the opposite vibe, which defeats the purpose of an analogy.
Hmmmm. I wonder how common this is. This is not how I think of the difference. I think of mathematicians as dealing with coherent systems of logic and engineers dealing with building in the real world. Mathematicians are useful when their system maps to the problem at hand, but not when it doesn’t.
I should say i have a maths degree so it’s possible that my view of mathematicians and the general view are not conincident.
My n=1 datapoint is that this was so traumatic for me during my math Ph.D. that I almost quit with a dissertation draft in hand. I’ve heard my advisor was more pedantic than normal though.
Why do you think it’s stretched. It’s about the difference between mathematicians and engineers. One group are about relating the real world the other are about logically consistent ideas that may be useful.
The analogy with mathematicians is very stretched.
Hmmm, what is the picture that the analogy gives you. I struggle to imagine how it’s misleading but I want to hear.
Ah, sorry for being so cursory.
A common trope about mathematicians vs. other math users is that mathematicians are paranoid persnickety truth-seekers, they want everything to be exactly correct down to every detail. Thus engineers and physicists often perceive mathematicians as a sort of fact-checker caste.
As you say, in some sense mathematicians deal with made-up stuff and engineers with real stuff. But from the engineer’s point of view, they deal with mathematicians when writing math, not when screwing bolts, and so perceive mathematicians as “the annoying people who want everything to be perfectly correct”.
Example: I write “E[E[X|Y]] = E[X]” in a paper, and the mathematician pops up complaining “What’s the measure space? Is it sigma-finite? You have to declare if your random variables are square-integrable. Are X and Y measureable in the same space?” and my reply would be “come on we know it’s true I don’t care about writing it properly”.
So to me and many people in STEM your analogy has the opposite vibe, which defeats the purpose of an analogy.
Hmmmm. I wonder how common this is. This is not how I think of the difference. I think of mathematicians as dealing with coherent systems of logic and engineers dealing with building in the real world. Mathematicians are useful when their system maps to the problem at hand, but not when it doesn’t.
I should say i have a maths degree so it’s possible that my view of mathematicians and the general view are not conincident.
My n=1 datapoint is that this was so traumatic for me during my math Ph.D. that I almost quit with a dissertation draft in hand. I’ve heard my advisor was more pedantic than normal though.
Why do you think it’s stretched. It’s about the difference between mathematicians and engineers. One group are about relating the real world the other are about logically consistent ideas that may be useful.