> What the author uses as his strawman is a linear algebra course for engineers. If that's true, I'm sorry for the engineers who took this course. I did not s

> What the author uses as his strawman is a linear algebra course for engineers. If that's true, I'm sorry for the engineers who took this course. I did not see a single number in my algebra course, neither 2d or 3d vectors. As a matter of fact, we followed the same program that math students (axioms, theorems, linear spaces, rings, ...). Even some teachers were teaching in both faculties, and our exams usually were more difficult (this was just a policy, there were too many engineering students). Now, I'm in a different university where the maths future engineers study are much more "practical". It's sad seeing that students cannot understand, for example, that a principal direction in a stress tensor is just an eigen-value or that a rotation is just a change of base and, therefore, there are many theorems and properties you can apply to these concepts just making use of some basic algebra. It's always good to know well the tools you have to use and, for an engineer, algebra is one of the most important tools.