<p>Do the engineers that make physical systems consider financial mathematics to be a form of engineering?</p>
<p>no (10 char)</p>
<p>I wish I could say no in 10 characters.</p>
<p>sure you can. </p>
<p>noooooooo.</p>
<p>Well, they don’t build anything physical…</p>
<p>Are you referring to quants?</p>
<p>If you are, then yes, they are engineers.</p>
<p>Is Monopoly money actually money?</p>
<p>No, not by any means.</p>
<p>There are people who use higher math and statistics in the financial industry. Results can be mixed, but big financial firms wouldn’t be paying them to do it if they saw no value in it (at least, they wouldn’t be doing it for very long).</p>
<p>But they are not engineers.</p>
<p>And you didn’t ask but let me make this very clear anyway, one cannot “engineer” the economy. The government planners trying to achieve certain targets for “affordable housing” or “full employment,” etc., are not engineers and are doomed to failure. They lack the specific, diffusely-spread knowledge that is required to make good decisions about such things. Study the works of F.A. Hayek (Nobel for Econ) for more insight on this.</p>
<p>My question is: do we judge engineering only by “physical means”? What about industrial and operational engineers?</p>
<p>“What about industrial and operational engineers?” </p>
<p>“Real” engineers wouldn’t count them either.
In fact at Cornell, years ago, the Industrial Engineering & Operations Research dept. (which was what “IE/OR” stood for at the time) was referred to as “imaginary engineering” by students in the other engineering majors.</p>
<p>“one cannot “engineer” the economy.”
True, but often one can assemble a portolio of securities which have certain individual expected or known payoff profiles, to create something which has a desired payoff profile . For puposes of hedging risks in your portfiolio, getting a desired return vs. risk profile, etc. To give one example. This is the sort of activity from which the “engineering” moniker was derived. Not 'engineering" the whole economy.</p>
<p>They are using mathematics and modeling to craft a desired “product”, of sorts, but the “product” is not physical.</p>
<p>I asked the same question to the Accreditation Board of Engineering and Technology (ABET) and this is the reply I got:</p>
<p>"Dear Mr. CalPolyEngineer</p>
<p>ROFLMAOL. Regards,</p>
<p>-ABET"</p>
<p>When’s it’s all said and done, financial engineering will still be financial engineering. Whether or not it’s actually considered engineering doesn’t really matter. It’s similar to asking if computer science is engineering or not.</p>
<p>Only if they do tensile tests on $100 bills.</p>
<p>CalPolyEngineer, Is that true what you asked and the response you got from ABET? If so that is pretty damn funny!</p>
<p>You have to remember that civil engineers didn’t want to consider other engineering disciplines at one time.</p>
<p>For clarification, are you claiming that Civil Engineers refused to recognize other engineering fields such as EE, ME, CE etc as qualifying as a legit engineering program? When and where was this pray tell since you got me curious now?</p>
<p>He means that happened a loooooong time ago.</p>
<p>Really? I would have figured ME was the original engineering.</p>
<p>As much as I would like that, people built shelter before they built machines.</p>
<p>Actually Qwerty was right. Before building a shelter you need tools.
That’s mechanical thing.
:]</p>
<p>But if you believe in God, then the first engineering product is the universe. That’s more or less is a software engineering IMO. ROFL
Then you have biological engineering - humans and living organism.</p>