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by nunuvit 1074 days ago
In engineering practice, we often start using math without first consulting numerical analysts. It takes a long time to identify and fix the inevitable issues, which eventually becomes a lesson we have to teach students and practicing engineers because the field has accumulated so much historical baggage from doing it the wrong way.

As an example, early device models for circuit simulation were not designed to be numerically differentiable, leading to serious numerical artifacts and performance issues. Now we have courses dedicated to designing such models, and numerical analysis is used and emphasized throughout.

Is there anything today that you look at and think "yeah, they're gonna need to fix that at some point"?