Dan (& All Contributors to this Topic)
I only landed on Planet PTC on April 10th 2012.
And on my third day here I've discovered this thread. Perhaps, as a rank beginner, an outsider who has landed here, you might like to hear a few reactions.
Firstly, the natives have been extremely kind and tolerant of my blundering around. Nobody has threatened me with a death ray! Help has been forthcoming and I am making some progress in understanding the language. I have received food for the brain to enable it to start and make adjustments to this new world.
Before setting out on the journey, I did a certain amount of research by looking at the Mathcad space as a guest.
I visited several of the communities to get a feel for what was going on there. I had no problem navigating around the traffic system to find the communities - they were all listed conveniently for me, and with easy to read signs too.
The fundamental problem - not with reorganising the community labels, but with classification - lies, surely in the nature of mathematics. I look at mathematics as a language. It connects many disciplines in terms of application, but if you look at when the techniques were actually developed, then the pure mathematicians were there many tens of years, and often over hundreds of years before the application was required.
Languages themselves have similar problems to the one raised here. For example, a person with a strong interest in obscure 17th century German poets would have little in common with someone studying ancient cuneiform.
As an outsider to planet PTC, and a rank beginner in Mathcad usage, the initial look around the various communities gave me confidence to commence the trip here. This is very important.
I also have a specific target - I want to understand what is happening within Mathcad, and through understanding become a proficient user. I felt the level of experience of the contributors, as well as the friendly attitude, would enable me to achieve this. This also was very important.
I realise that, to achieve my target, I do not need a ready cooked meal in the form of me posting a question and receiving a solution correcting, in the most friendly way, the twenty three errors I would undoubtedly make. Therefore, I gave serious thought to the first post and the nature of the problem. It concerns solution to thick cylinder problems using the equations originally developed by Gabriel Lame (1795 - 1870). [Just have a look at Lame's contributions to mathematics and engineering to realise what challenges he would pose to the Mathcad classification systems proposed.] This problem has some complexity, and would I judged, take me into more than one area of the Mathcad product, so I would be able to get a feel of how it hangs together to produce a result. This is also, I believe, important
In setting out the problem I needed help with - which is a vehicle to greater understanding of Mathcad - I was very careful to put it in the Mechanical Engineering pigeon hole, but not to attach tags of any type. After all, I am a novice, and I had no idea where the quest for knowledge would take me. I did not even know that the first error I received from the system would lead, through the guidance of the experts, to functions. And I suspect that, as my capabilities grow, I could end up somewhere in the exotic provinces of differential equations, solvers (still do not know what a solve block is - is it like writer's block, you want to solve something but can't commit anything to paper?), etc.
Now, of course, this approach would not suit an engineer who has a problem on his desk, and mangement wanting a solution yesterday. Engineering is replete with on the job training exercises that involve getting product out to the customer at the end of the week and, well, just surviving. It is also replete with failures produced by over use of this technique. Think space shuttle Challenger. My approach will not produce results quickly. But I have to ask, is there a method that would produce results quickly, particularly if the problem is complex? The answer is probably not.
At present I feel the classifiaction of the communities works fine, provided that the search capabilites include all Booleans, and can work across all communities as a user option rather than a default. Having said that I have not used the search yet, I have just wandered around the Mathcad spce looking at what is available, reading and trying to assess what it all means interms of understanding the product.
Finally, as a metallurgical engineer, I was pleased to receive a copper grading and some points as a result of my posting. What do I do with the copper and the points?
Kind regards
John
