Look Who it Was Random video

An Engineer's Box of Chocolates

2,200 views · Published 2 December 2011 · 23:26 · Indexed 31 October 2026

Channel: Wolfram · 2011 · Science & Technology

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While mechanical engineers certainly are responsible for huge amounts of computation, their approach to doing math can be somewhat practical: they need some way to get things done (and please, no metaphysical debates about error representations of floating point numbers, because there in fact is a deadline for this car/airplane/rocket/toaster crash test). Especially in R&D, one is faced with all kinds of ever-changing tasks involving dirty real-world processes that obstinately refuse to behave according to theory (and sometimes depend more on the day of the week and the weather than on calculation), but still need to be dealt with. Thus the box of chocolates analogy: sometimes you really don't know what you're going to get—but you'd better get it done by next week, thank you very much, chop-chop. On the plus side, no one is going to fire you because you used a horribly inefficient root-finding method (as long as it works, that is). Because many of those tasks do involve really non-standard problems and processes, you need a flexible, rapidly deployable tool. As it turns out, Mathematica does exceptionally well here. 

In this talk from the Wolfram Technology Conference 2011, Yves Klett from the Institute of Aircraft Design & University of Stuttgart, Germany presents a few select examples that make particularly good use of Mathematica in everyday (and not so everyday) research, ranging from test data analysis to computational origami.
 
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