Bush
cute lil war dog
- Joined
- Nov 18, 2008
- Messages
- 5,182
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Minored in math in undergrad. I've still got a lot of the concepts down pat, but I hardly remember many of the implementation details behind many of them beyond differential equations or so.
In operations research, I'm usually able to get away with providing a "good enough" picture of some phenomenon, system, problem, etc. -- what sorts of mathematical models/methods could be used to represent it, what assumptions would have to be made, and whether those assumptions would take us away from the problem at hand. Then, other folks could take that ball and roll with it.
I'm a fan of looking out for needless complications and nixing them before we dive in. Sometimes, the more advanced methods aren't necessary. We don't need a damn Rube-Goldberg machine to hammer a nail -- we have, you know, hammers -- but we might need something pretty damn close to one if we need to collect and stabilize aerosols or something.
In operations research, I'm usually able to get away with providing a "good enough" picture of some phenomenon, system, problem, etc. -- what sorts of mathematical models/methods could be used to represent it, what assumptions would have to be made, and whether those assumptions would take us away from the problem at hand. Then, other folks could take that ball and roll with it.
I'm a fan of looking out for needless complications and nixing them before we dive in. Sometimes, the more advanced methods aren't necessary. We don't need a damn Rube-Goldberg machine to hammer a nail -- we have, you know, hammers -- but we might need something pretty damn close to one if we need to collect and stabilize aerosols or something.