He said that particular attention was drawn to commercial advantage, the contribution to research, education and the role of the computer. Engineers often complain that mathematical modelling follows engineering pragmatism and the need to produce affordable solutions, but once in place the modelling can, with versatile and adaptable computer software, actually improve upon existing processes and get products to the market more speedily. Real industrial case studies very often pose exceptionally challenging research problems and these in turn can be broken down into new course material and student projects. The partitioning of matrices often proves highly useful in getting theoretical results or in reducing the computational work for systems with a high degree of freedom. One example where substantial computer time can be saved is with the transient voltage distributions in altering ladder networks which can be determined by a system of linear ordinary differential equations with a periodic tridiagonal coefficient matrix.
Theoretical results enable problems to be solved quickly in explicit form.
If anything, the mathematical education of engineers was rather under-represented at plenary level in this conference compared to similar events elsewhere, but the Esslingen experience seems to reflect those being felt in other countries about the declining mathematical fitness of engineering students. The results of a recent test given to freshman students showed a lower mean than anticipated by college staff, a very wide spread of marks, significant differences between different potential engineering sub-specialisations, and significant differences between different admission criteria. Such a programme for freshman engineers exists in an increasing number of universities in several countries. The afternoon parallel sessions took place in three groups. The range of topics covered very many aspects of engineering mathematics in 62 papers.