How To Excel Additional Mathematics?

Question pertaining Nikola Tesla's quote on mathematics?

• "Today's scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. " ~ Nikola Tesla I was wondering as I read this quote. Tesla was an electrical engineer. I have been told many times that to become an engineer you have to become good or excel in mathematics. How in the hell did someone like Nikola Tesla become an amazing engineer, despite the fact he died broke, when he hated math? I am in Tesla's shoes. I hate math, but want to become an engineer. So the question to ask is, is it possible to be a good engineer without, or at least a strong dislike towards, math? I figure if Tesla could do it, I got a shot. Right?

• Answer:

  You might disagree with me here, but I feel like math is easy to write off when it is not understood or can not be applied to anything useful (for each specific person). The truth of the matter is that engineers don't use that complicated of mathematics, but what mathematics they do use is absolutely vital to practicing engineering. It seems a lot of times engineers also make out tables and graphs, so that you don't need to sit there and calculate differential equations problems (or even sometimes low level calculus problems). But in my opinion, no, you can not be a good engineer without math. If you have a strong dislike towards it, it might be good to figure out WHY you don't like it. the Tesla quote: I worked as a tutor for middle school students during my second year of college. One of the students that I tutored was pretty obviously mentally disabled. When he came to me with a word problem that he just couldn't figure out I would ask him how he got his answer. he would then go into this long process of picking out each of the numbers in the word problem and going through different arbitrary computations of adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing these numbers together in efforts to get the correct answer. It was rather obvious to me that he was not really articulating the word problem and that the physical meaning of the numbers had no importance to him. When I read that Tesla quote, I feel like he is ridiculing other scientists for blindly putting together equations with similar variables or numbers and claiming that the resultant conclusions make physical sense, which is not always the case. My recommendation is that if you really just like tinkering, building and performing experiments, rather than designing the machines/circuits/systems/models behind it, then look into engineering technology.