Question: How important is maths in engineering

Jarrod Hart answered on 12 Jun 2016:

Well, yes it’s pretty important! I could list all the ways it’s useful, but rather I’d like to focus on how much maths is ‘essential’…

You see, engineering is a very wide field, it’s all about understanding and manipulating the world around us. To do that we often need to measure things and we often need to compare things – we have to calculate the chance of things happening and finally we have to manage money.
So to do these things, one does not always need to know the really trickiest maths; most engineers do not actually know how to do matrices or LaPlace transforms, most of what we do is ‘arithmetic’ (sums!).
Sure, electrical engineers need to cover things like signal processing which uses higher maths such as ‘differential equations’, ‘matrices’, ‘eigenvectors’ and ‘imaginary numbers’ – and computer engineers need to undertand binary (how to do sums with only 1’s and 0’s) – but again, I would say most engineers don’t do signals, we don’t calculate multidimensional energy fluxes, and we don’t model the chemical reactions inside a nuclear reactor. I can’t recall the last time I used the ‘sin’ ‘cos’ or ‘tan’ functions on my calculator.

In other words, if you are not ‘into’ fancy ‘higher’ maths, you can indeed still become an engineer… but you can’t get away without being a master of the basics.

You need to have strong instincts for quantities, sizes, volumes, for weights, energy, temperature and time – and you need to be a master of switching and transforming between these quantities – and it it helps if you find that easy…

So in short, it is better to have a good gut instinct for numbers than to have a degree in maths. Hope that helps!!!