Since I rarely ride my bike outside Santa Clara County, I enjoy receiving Academic Discount requests, reading what users are doing, checking out their web pages, etc. Sometimes I get to tell a bit of my story. A math professor got this one yesterday:
Around 1980. When I was taking solid-state physics as an electrical engineer in graduate school, on our first exam were asked to model as a differential equation the diffusion of electrons and holes between two parallel rectangular plates. And then part two of the problem was: "Now solve the equation." Students who could not remember e^-ax lost 50% of the credit, and they were so mad that the professor dare to weight so heavily their remembering a mathematical fact which they could look up in a handbook. "We're done with undergrad math!" was their attitude. But Dr. Melvin Shaw would not budge. "You want to be a master of electrical engineering without being able to write down the solution to a first-order differential equation with constant coefficients? There are engineers who get paid actual money to write these things down every day."
Today's young engineers probably use computer files of their own course notes which they have access to wherever they go, a search engine, or mathematical software. Even for me, these things are much closer than Reference Data for Radio Engineers which sits way up on my top shelf. But the best reference is when you just know it.
Jerry Krinock