A Rational Approach

Generally speaking, the engineer's mind tends to be rather pragmatic and practical.  And mine is no exception.  I rail against things like imperial over metric units, calendars that begin the week on Sunday, 12 versus 24 hour time, pi rather than tau, and so forth.

If a new concept or method can be clearly explained to me that has obvious advantages over its predecessor, then in my opinion it should be adopted.  Period.  Status quo and its length be damned (even in such a case as "it's been that way for centuries" or perhaps — especially in that case?)

Stumbling across Professor +njwildberger's YouTube channel several months ago (a treasure trove of mathematical instruction if there ever was one), it seems I found perhaps the single most pragmatic and practical professor of mathematics one could ever hope to meet.

It is simply not possible to too strongly encourage you to watch any one of his many series of lectures.

Math Foundations, for example, will at the very least force you to reconsider closely many of the core concepts of mathematics, such as real numbers and set theory.  While Rational Trigonometry will have you asking yourself, "Why... why couldn't I have been taught trigonometry with this method when I was a student?!"  And his lectures on The History of Mathematics are easily the most in depth and interesting I've yet found.

This is but the tip of the iceberg.  There is much, much more.  I hope you'll enjoy the channel as much as I have.  (And given the sheer volume of uploads there, I'm sure I will be for quite some time to come!)

Outlet Needed

And so it begins... finally... I think... Oh, screw it.  We'll see how it goes!

Euler's Identity becomes Unity
when expressed with Tau

In the late 80's,  a young engineering student's love for mathematics came to an abrupt end, essentially destroyed during a course in linear algebra and differential equations by a professor disinterested in the actual teaching of the subject— droning on and on in an almost unintelligibly thick, monotone German accent with no care whatsoever whether those he taught could comprehend him, let alone the subject at hand.

Mathematics became no more than a tools in the engineer's arsenal.  It was a language of symbols that simply allowed one to construct best estimate models of the world around us.  Applying formulae correctly and making the correct calculations were all that was of importance.  Mathematics was... mundane.