"Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum on a frictionless plane..." That joke comes from the analytic calculus tradition of physics. I took a lot of physics whil

"Consider a spherical cow in a vacuum on a frictionless plane..." That joke comes from the analytic calculus tradition of physics. I took a lot of physics while an undergrad, and I came out unable to do any useful physics. This is because as soon as you try even very simple problems the partial differential equations that result have either no, or extremely difficult to find solutions, and it is usually the former. I spent years learning analytical tricks that I just don't apply. There has been a lot of push back on this in education recently. There are Giordano's and Sherwood&Chabay's textbooks in physics now which emphasize computation over analytics. The reality is that if you want to do the vast majority of work in physics you will be doing things like reducing your problem to Ax=b, and throwing the linear algebra machinery against it. I type this while taking a break from Strang's "Linear Algebra, Geodesy, and GPS" textbook, which I need for work right now. There is an endless need for this sort of math. Sure, it is a matter of balance. But I flip through my diff eq books and I don't see a lot in there that I actually need. There is nothing in Strang that I don't know, and ditto for a good numerical methods book. Even the work that Gauss did with orbits did was linear algebra and computation. He did not analytically derive the motion of Ceres, for example, but used linear algebra to compute it. I, along with many other posters on this thread, and everyone that I have talked to, wish that there STEM education had been much more about Ax=b, the only problem we really solve, and a lot less about using huge tables of analytic integrations to try to find answers to equations that we will never encounter in the real world because they are so specially crafted as to have an analytic solution.