<p>so i just started my graduate classes and there is soooooo much math!! from the course outline of one of my courses, it looks like we are spending the first month deriving equations. </p>
<p>I spent the last year working in industry and this is QUITE a contrast.</p>
<p><em>sigh</em></p>
<p>Yeah… that is why the pay academics to think and people in industry to do. ;-)</p>
<p>Seriously though, math is what describes basically everything about nature. It all boils down to physics, which boils down to math. If you want to understand the science behind your area of study, you need to know math, plain and simple.</p>
<p>I <3 math :D</p>
<p>thermo - I feel your pain. Like you, I returned from industry, and like you I was shocked by just how much more math went into all my courses. I just spent yesterday writing up a homework assignment that was basically just 15 pages of equations. They were not innately hard, but since my professor decided to keep everything in terms of irreducible constants the equations became insanely complex…</p>
<p>Interesting. As for me, there is no such thing as “too much math”. What type of math are you doing (directed at cosmicfish as well)? Is it just advanced PDEs?</p>
<p>Glasss - mostly, yes. Some of my courses simply assumed a higher level of mathematical knowledge than I had yet attained, and many of the rest required reasonable math, but in painful ways. As an example, I had a course where one homework consisted almost entirely of performing Fourier transforms (with which I was well familiar) for relatively complex functions, and entirely in terms of arbitrary constants - while the process was simple, the algebra got to be so unwieldy that hardly anyone in the class was actually able to get to the correct answers without making mistakes along the way!</p>