> I agree, theoretical math students and staff are a bit dismissive about everything else.
I think this does go somewhat both ways. E.g. in the current discussion there are quite a few people complaining about "useless maths". I think a big problem is that different areas of studies don't appreciate that they are, well, different, and it's not trivial to transfer ideas across fields.
> Just read a bit about how Einstein came up general relativity
Also an interesting story about special relativity: Minkowski (Einstein's math professor) proposed very early on to Einstein that special relativity should be formulated geometrically (with what's now called Minkowski spaces), but Einstein deemed it too mathy and unintuitive, only to accept later that it was the right way to go. Without the geometric formulation it's very possible Einstein wouldn't have developed general relativity later on.
> But the usefulness and practicality of it only clicked after I moved to higher frequency problems and started using frequency domain when working with my circuits.
One argument for teaching FT more abstractly is that the "useful parts" are quite different in different fields. E.g. in many applications of sound and acoustics (and probably in EE) the main interest is in the spectrum. But in e.g. statistics the main thing is the convolution theorem and the spectrum has practically no use.
I think this does go somewhat both ways. E.g. in the current discussion there are quite a few people complaining about "useless maths". I think a big problem is that different areas of studies don't appreciate that they are, well, different, and it's not trivial to transfer ideas across fields.
> Just read a bit about how Einstein came up general relativity
Also an interesting story about special relativity: Minkowski (Einstein's math professor) proposed very early on to Einstein that special relativity should be formulated geometrically (with what's now called Minkowski spaces), but Einstein deemed it too mathy and unintuitive, only to accept later that it was the right way to go. Without the geometric formulation it's very possible Einstein wouldn't have developed general relativity later on.
> But the usefulness and practicality of it only clicked after I moved to higher frequency problems and started using frequency domain when working with my circuits.
One argument for teaching FT more abstractly is that the "useful parts" are quite different in different fields. E.g. in many applications of sound and acoustics (and probably in EE) the main interest is in the spectrum. But in e.g. statistics the main thing is the convolution theorem and the spectrum has practically no use.