/sci/ - Science & Math

Physicists learn enough mathematics to study physics. Engineers learn enough physics and mathematics to practice engineering. The differences may start to blur at higher levels of education, e.g. a mathematician studying theta functions and a physicist studying quantum field theory may end up converging in research interests, but in general it's unreasonable to expect that an engineer knows as much about physics as a physicist or that either knows as much about mathematics as a mathematician.
>I feel that the mathematics and physics community dislikes engineers because they are jealous of them.
Possible, but not for the reason you describe. Engineering programs tend to attract people who want to be upwardly mobile, that is they chose to study engineering so they could make a lot of money. In terms of motivation, it's a lot closer to being a premed than being a math major or physics major. That's not to say that the motivations of math and physics majors are necessarily more 'pure', but they're different, which creates friction when these different people share classes. If anyone's jealous of engineers, it probably has more to do with money than knowledge: think "why does this dipshit think he's going to make 6 figures when he can't even write a proof?" more than "damn, he understands thermodynamics AND materials science?"

>>14946512
>writes post like a drunken esl slav
>believing anything a drunken esl slav tells you

How do I calculate the probability that within some defined space two shapes will overlap? I mean shapes, not simple objects. For instance, if you took paper cutout circles and skinny swastikas of equal area they would not intersect at the same frequency. I would want to do it by defining each object as a polygon, counting the sparseness/coverage, ie the degree of non-overlap, by taking each point in its outline and drawing a line between it and every other point in the polygon, then adding those distances. And then this quantity would be multiplied by some constant and the cross sectional area of the polygon to find the probability of overlap. Does something like this approach make sense? Also, what if there are two kinds of polygon (shapes) you’re dealing with?

Here is a problem which illustrates what I’m trying to solve for a particular dataset: there is a Xerox machine, a box of thin swastika paper cutouts, and a box of heart cutouts. Dump the boxes onto the machine. What is the probability that a given heart will land on a swastika?

Forgive me for the redundancy, unclarity and mathematical illiteracy. I have only used math to calculate tips since high school.