Controlled by digital ‘mates’
WE HAVE two computers in my home.
It’s absurd how dependent on them we have become.
Kids take computing as an integral part of their life experiences.
It would be unthinkable for today’s youngsters to live their lives as if computers did not exist.
Much to my own surprise, an old bumbler like me has similarly grown to a stage where even a few minutes without access to a computer completely stuffs me.
It is fascinating to see how, knowingly or unknowingly, the use of computers now shapes our lives and dominates the way we approach most aspects of our daily work.
Our home computers, for as yet undetermined reasons, have just stopped working! I use mine to record my Wednesday stories and to transmit them to The Chronicle.
I’m just realising that I had better turn my mind to delivering what you are currently reading if the digital masters fail to get their fingers out and pour life back into my desk companion.
It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, that we should become so controlled by our digital mates?
I started teaching engineering science, including computer programming, back in the 60s when I was an incredibly young lecturer in the University of Birmingham.
I wasn’t half as knowledgeable as I thought I was, but thrilled to be lecturing to really bright undergraduates some of whom were older than me.
I never admitted that I was as young as I actually was and I relied upon rigorous preparation for each lecture.
I was lucky, too, in that more senior colleagues gave a helping hand to the fresh-faced young lecturer appearing in the staffroom.
Birmingham University’s Faculty of Engineering was superb in both the quality of its staff (with the odd exception) and the equipment and facilities for teaching research.
At the time I joined the staff (1962) the faculty had its own computer and was one of the earliest engineer facilities to include engineering programming among its undergraduate courses.
‘‘ LONG LIVE MATHS AND ITS APPLICATION TO THE REAL WORLD!
It was the beginning of the time when FORTRAN and BASIC were the fashion for producing solution procedures incorporated in standard undergraduate engineering programs.
These Procedural Languages became an integral part of the solution routine and non-routine engineering tasks.
BASIC in particular became the facilitator of program solutions in areas where we never believed we could be fully competent.
One of my main tasks was to teach engineering science to undergraduates with BASIC being the medium together with FORTRAN IV.
This enabled us to replace theoretical expectations with actual problem outcomes.
In my particular area (the analysis of engineering structures, for example) we were able to generate useful solutions to real problems. We were also able to add enormous solution capability to that which already existed.
The intuitive design and analysis of engineering structures such as bridges and buildings were greatly enhanced by the comfort of knowing that there was generally good science behind the intuition.
During my own undergraduate program at the University of Bristol, I was extremely fortunate in having superb lecturers.
They were a fine mixture of research academics and professional engineers and would have recognised there is much more to analysis and design than mere mathematics and optimistic theory.
However, people such as my Head of Dept, Prof. Sir Alfred Pugsley, a superb world leader in bridge design and analysis among other things, would be the first to recognise the importance of mathematics in supporting and reinforcing their intuitive skills.
It was one thing to know what an outcome was likely to be but quite another to be capable of generating the details of that outcome in a usable format.
We engineers owe pure and applied mathematicians a great depth of gratitude!
Long live maths and its application to the real world!