I was reading an
older post on Jimmac's blog, and by traversing its links I found a cool quote in
this post that remind me a discussion I had with some of my classmates:
...
2,500 years ago, a Greek writer told us something about creating software: Thucydides wrote, “The society that separates its scholars from its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting by fools.”
...
Currently I am about to finish my M.S. in Computer Science. My research area is
Computational and
Discrete Geometry. During my master studies I've met a lot of mathematicians (students and professors) which avoid any engineering related knowledge. Some of them even look down on engineers or, afraid of not being taken seriously, have forsaken and are reluctant to accept their engineering background.
I got my B.S. on Computer Engineering (i.e. I am an engineer) and have found no substantial difference between my and my classmates' capacity for solving geometric problems or designing algorithms. The obvious difference is my lack of background on some topics and my lack of experience in mathematical writing. However, when I talked about this with my advisor, he told me that among the best of his students were a couple of engineers, that I should not worry about that, and that I just have to work a little bit harder on those matters.
It is well known among computer engineers and discrete mathematicians that the best results in both fields comes from multi-discipline (
here you can find a very interesting discussion about this matter in computational geometry). I even found very recently that the computer engineer-scientist is a very valuable profile in companies such as Facebook, Google or Cisco, and also found some success stories about this approach in a very recent research field called
Human Computation (google on ReCaptcha or Gwap for some cool Human Computation projects).
When I worked together with some foreign researchers, I found that because of my background, I could propose a very different insight into problems that turned out to be very useful. I think, as Thucydides suggests, that the best results will be achieved when we decide (or not be reluctant) to mix different fields of knowledge. I strongly believe that, as long as we embrace the scholar-warrior (or warrior-scholar) profile, we will be able to solve more difficult and interesting problems in the future.
