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Physicists avoid highly mathematical work despite being trained in advanced mathematics, new research suggests. The study, published in the New Journal of Physics, shows that physicists pay less attention to theories that are crammed with mathematical details. This suggests there are real and widespread barriers to communicating mathematical work, and that this is not because of poor training in mathematical skills, or because there is a social stigma about doing well in mathematics.
Dr Tim Fawcett and Dr Andrew Higginson, from the University of Exeter, found, using statistical analysis of the number of citations to 2000 articles in a leading physics journal, that articles are less likely to be referenced by other physicists if they have lots of mathematical equations on each page. [...] Dr Higginson said: "We have already showed that biologists are put off by equations but we were surprised by these findings, as physicists are generally skilled in mathematics.
"This is an important issue because it shows there could be a disconnection between mathematical theory and experimental work. This presents a potentially enormous barrier to all kinds of scientific progress."
http://phys.org/news/2016-11-physicists-mathematics.html
[Abstract]: Statistical Analysis of the Effect of Equations on Citations
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Sunday November 13 2016, @08:46PM
So, in school, I spent about 10-20% of my time in math and math heavy coursework, learned some cool stuff, then graduated and went to work in bio-informatics analysis software development, which is more or less where I've been since 1990. In this relatively math-heavy line of work, I break out the heavy math tools about once every 5 years - I'd say, honestly, less than 0.2% of my work involves any kind of math more complex than a column sum on a spreadsheet. My younger colleagues shy away from the "heavy stuff," preferring to go shop for a library package that has already worked it out for them (which may sometimes be an efficient alternative to "roll and validate your own".)
Occasionally I run up against intractable math problems (care to simulate the heating at the tip of an arbitrarily bent coil of wire placed in an MRI receiving 64 or 128MHz RF excitation pulses?... nope, and neither does anyone else as far as we can tell.) Sometimes it's just hard, maybe a dozen lines of algebra - once I had to fill a sheet of paper with the equation solution (taking the better part of a full day, plus another day to find the mistake and verify the final solution was correct.) In between, literal years go by with no reason to do anything more than a summation, or possibly run a signal through somebody else's FFT library.
For all the study of math, it doesn't appear to be "where the work is at" in real life. Maybe 0.2% of the working population does heavy math >20 hours a week, the rest of us just have meetings where we talk about how to rate something 1-5 for a decision making table, even if half the people in the room don't understand the math behind the table, that doesn't stop them from voicing their opinion, at length, about how the topic du jour deserves to be a 3 instead of a 4.
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