[steamrolled]

I don't get why EE education emphasizes problems of this sort. The infinite grid is an extreme example, but solving weirdly complicated problems involving Kirchoff's laws and Thevenin's theorem was a common way to torture students back in my day...

Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms. It's a pure math puzzle centered around an "infinite grid of linear A=B/C equations". Not the puzzle I ever felt the need to know the answer to, but I certainly don't judge others for geeking out about it.

[goochphd]

I was about to say "they still torture students this way" but stopped myself when I remembered I took Circuits 1 and 2 back in 2007. So maybe my knowledge is dated too...

It's a weird butterfly effect moment in my career though. I had an awesome professor for circuits 1, and ended up switching majors to EE after that. Then got two more degrees on top of the bachelor's

[bsder]

> I don't get why EE education emphasizes problems of this sort

Last I checked, they don't. I certainly never hit an "infinite grid of resistors" in general circuits and systems except as some weird "bonus" problem in the textbook.

Occasionally, I would hit something like this when we would be talking about "transmission lines" to make life easier, not harder. ("Why can we approximate an infinite grid of inductors and capacitors to look like a resistor?")

It's possible that infinite grid/infinite cube might have some pedagogical context when talking about fields and antennas, but I don't remember any.

[jesuslop]

If all you mind is the EE curriculum then ok. Or else there is an interesting work of Gerald Westendorp on the web [1] on how allowing other classical passive components (Ls & Cs) you can get discretizations (and hence alternative views) of a very wide class of iconic Physics partial differential equations (to the point that the question is more what cannot be fit to this technique). G. W. is alive and kicking in mathstodon.

[1] https://westy31.nl/Electric.html

[choonway]

There are two parts to education. One is to impart knowledge, the other is to filter the students.

[Nevermark]

The third is to challenge students. With unusual concepts, preferably.

How else to create students capable of solving problems we cannot anticipate today?

Not to mention, that understanding strange problems is a very efficient way to broaden horizons.

[dwattttt]

You're missing general problem solving. If all people do is encounter problems they've already seen before, well, we have lookup tables for that kind of thing.

[colechristensen]

Not entirely wrong but it's a little too easy to use that argument for squashing any criticism for education content.

[ohxh]

> Here, I don't think it's even useful to look at this problem in electronic terms

I always thought this problem was a funny choice for the comic, because it’s not that esoteric! It’s equivalent to asking about a 2d simple random walk on a lattice, which is fairly common. And in general the electrical network <-> random walk correspondence is a useful perspective too

[bobmcnamara]

> solving weirdly complicated problems involving Kirchoff's laws and Thevenin's theorem was a common way to torture students back in my day...

Hey now, those actually come up sometimes.

[Workaccount2]

One of my core grips with STEM education, mainly the math heavy part of it, which frankly is most of it, is that it is taught primarily by people who love math.

The people who loved application and practical solutions went to industry, the people who got off spending a weekend grinding a theoretical infinite resistor grid solution went into academia.

[steamrolled]

Loving math is not necessarily a problem. But if you want others to love it too, you have to explain it in a way that makes them see the light.

A lot of STEM education is more along the lines of "take the rapid-fire calculus class, memorize a bunch of formulas, and then use them to find the transfer function of this weird circuit". It's not entirely useless, but it doesn't make you love the theory.

[esafak]

In school I would have relished solving this problem. Now I wonder if it has any application.

[tekla]

To make you think, and not become another monkey moving blocks along