Problem Formulation Using the Three Worlds Strategy

This is a follow up lecture of the “The Three Worlds: Physical, Conceptual and Formal”. The first lecture introduced the three different ways in which humans view things and happenings. In this follow up lecture, a few concrete examples will be worked to illustrate the process of abstraction in the hope that you will be able to apply that to the problems in your domain. The importance of units in the process of abstraction will be highlighted and exemplified. How do you know whether a feature of a physical is to be excluded from your model? A concrete criterion will be discussed to decide about such issues during abstraction. The lecture will be concluded with how the universal language of Mathematics allows you to describe seemingly different systems by the same model. The key to this universality is scaling and non-dimensionalization.

About the Speaker:

Dr. Mukhtar Ullah is Professor and Head of Department of Electrical Engineering at FAST National University of Computer and Emerging Sciences.