It's amazing what you can find out about what you don't know just by doing a PhD. Honestly, I always thought my maths was my forte but it's really once you start reading paper and confused about the symbols that they are using that you realise something is wrong. Something is terribly, horribly wrong. My supervisor always comment that we're not doing enough maths in engineering, esepcially if you compare our syllabus with the stuff outside. But really. For something like me to get to postgrad doing sig pro and with THIS much gap in my maths, something isn't quite right.
One theory is that with the amount of help one can get with computers nowadays, mathematics is almost redundant. But computer is just a tool. It cannot replace mathematics. True, sometimes you can get away with not knowing exactly what the formula does and still get a result, but to understand what the formula is doing, or even to improve on the method and optimise things, you still need to go back to the mathematics and work from there.
Hopefully it'll all make sense at some stage. It always does. Just need to focus.
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