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ESD.02 Essentials of Engineering Lecture Notes

Being Quantitative

  • Using Numbers (and not just relative words)
  • Estimating and Bounding
  • Being Exact
    - units
    - digits
    - significance / fidelity
    - defining

    Being quantitative is really just effective communication.

    Using Numbers
    Compare:
    "Pedro struck out a large number of batters."
    "Pedro struck out 16 Devil Rays."

  • Words for Engineers to Avoid (or at least should define):
    - very
    - significant
    - about
    - large / small
    The problem with these words is that not much information is transferred. At best, relative information can be implied. These words are rather useless as adverbs: "significantly better" is equivalent to "better."
  • Define a metric and a convention
    MIT produces twice as many papers as Yale
    In the above sentence, "twice" is the metric and "papers" is the convention.
  • Defining Approximations
    What does "about 50 yards" mean to you?
    Poll of Class: one person said 20-70 yards, three people said 40-60, one said 45-54, one 48-52