[tnecniv]

A lot of peers in my PhD cohort and myself were always impressed with how much more math the average dissertation seemed to contain 50 years ago when we’d flip through the copies kept in the break room. Even non-theorists had to do a lot more analysis themselves since simulations were non-existent, not accessible, or not good enough for their needs back then.

We always wondered if we were missing out on some insight or intuition by not having to churn through the mathematical analysis they did because simulation was so easy for us. On one hand, the computer can tackle situations we could never come up with a good approximation for to studying analytically. On the other hand, maybe we’d be asking our computers smarter questions if we had to grind through that stuff by hand in our own research for a few years before getting high-quality simulations.