> was the gradual shift from very symbolic, human friendly (one might say 'elegant') mathematics into more brute force, pure crunching techniques. Conversely,

> was the gradual shift from very symbolic, human friendly (one might say 'elegant') mathematics into more brute force, pure crunching techniques. Conversely, in these days when anyone can go buy themselves a couple of teraflops at the shop round the corner, when you look at the way they solved problems back in day it feels very strange. But then, they didn't have a choice of course. However, when you look at modern physics courses (worst offender IMO is standard quantum mechanics courses), where huge swaths of times are expanded trying to find closed form solutions to Schrödinger's equation, it feels very bizarre (and a giant waste of time).