[analog31]

I once told a math teacher at a Big Ten university, that I thought their undergrad math instruction for engineers was weak. As an example, I said that I didn't think students learned any engineering applications of differential equations. He looked at me with a straight face and said: "There are no engineering applications of differential equations."

[zerohp]

My undergrad was at a Big Ten university. The analog signal processing course in EE teaches how to use differential equations to solve circuits. Right after they taught it, we learned laplace transform and never looked at a differential equation again.

[tnecniv]

Same with my EE undergrad. Then I got to grad school and decided to take a course in Linear Systems, which is when I realized my ODEs course taught me nothing.

[agf]

That is really, really hard to believe. I can't say that I remember any discussion of applications in my differential equations course (also at a Big Ten school), but I'm positive the professor could have provided them.

I didn't have a particular need for examples in a course, as differential equations were held up as the holy grail of math by my father, an optical engineer -- he used them at work fairly often, and frequently they were what made him better able to solve a problem than an engineer who wasn't comfortable using them.

[gk1]

I took the differential equation course over a summer, which means an entire semester was condensed into four weeks. I passed the class but I couldn't tell you a single application for differential equations at the time.

Don't know if the professor could've done anything better or if they had no choice but to plow through it because of the time constraints.

[giardini]

"He looked at me with a straight face and said: "There are no engineering applications of differential equations."

This made me laugh; I think he wanted you to laugh too.

Some DE courses could be better described as _histories_ of the applications of mathematics. Consequently they appear to be little more than a patchwork of tricks and hints. My DE professor, as adept with applications as theory, weaved this patchwork together quite skillfully and held our interest.

BTW his DE skills paid his bills extremely well (oil companies have lots of DEs to solve), while the university position allowed time for theory and was frosting on the cake.

[lagadu]

That answer doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I'm a software engineer so I forgot everything taught in those classes the moment I turned the exam in but I've a friend who's a professor of something that mechanical engineers take related to fluids (don't ask me details, we don't even live in the same country any longer); at one point he told me that anything other than numerical analysis is absolutely worthless in the real world because you can't find analytical solutions for almost anything.