The equations should be tied to the explanation and/or purpose of the of the review. If one is reviewing chocolate chip cookies I don't keep to know the chemical reaction equations unless it relates to why a certain recipe adds a certain characteristic to the cookie (i.e. why adding baking soda vs baking powder makes a difference). So the survey should add the choice "maybe".
I see E14 as an engineering community and Engineering is dependent on maths - so it ought to be there.
I try to keep it simple and structure my blogs so it's possible to follow them without understanding the maths, not every one has the same level of understanding or interest.
I only get cross about maths in articles when it's used to try and set up a barrier to keep people out (a lot of academic papers use this technique, both with maths and with the type of language).
I agree with Fred27 too. It doesn't hurt to include detail that may not be read or examined closely, because one day someone will come along and may wish to replicate or understand further.
Some may prefer charts or a spreadsheet or program instead. Some things are easier to do in code - especially where we may not have the skills to derive a formula but know a way to get the computer to work a result out. MATLAB is powerful for that. T
Others like to write a blog in a white-paper style, not overly assuming knowledge, but still drilling down into a topic.It's hard to predict knowledge level (i.e. hope it's not too basic, and hope it's not too complex), and at what point people switch off, so the white paper has to navigate that.
Results-based blogs (where no derivation has been made - it may be too complex to do it) are valuable too. Part of the challenge is to see what caused certain results. Lots of hobby or commercial parts are black boxes with limited information so work has to be partially experimental.
Others prefer university or research paper style although sometimes there is an expectation for the reader to understand certain things like vectors or other math notation and procedures to convert that into something practical. Blogs at least allow lots of hyperlinks for the user, inline code and so on, whereas traditional PDF'd papers couldn't do that, or have all the numbered references at the bottom, out-of-context.
The latter are for a different audience though - a good example being the FM music synthesis paper from Stanford. It needed translation. Had the PDF paper been understandable to the engineers at the traditional organ companies, they could have done something with it. Instead, Yamaha bought the rights and turned the math formulas into (initially analog) signal processing and into a musical instrument and exclusively had FM synth offerings for 20 years.
I made the poll, because I've had the impression that there is some kind of aversion to math and I've been wondering if I should reduce the amount of equations and math of my blogs. I've seen some trend on the internet of trying to convert engineering more into an art than a mathematically-based approach. It appears many value explanations or descriptions with the minimum amount of math...
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