I studied Engineering and graduated with honors, but I must admit that I never liked mathematical analysis, and was never too good at it. I found it as being too abstract and hard to visualize; on the other hand, I loved computer science, it was my second nature, I could naturally visualize it without efforts. My thesis work, when I graduated, was about a simulation of an automatic storage system at a car factory, which I simulated using what are now generically called cellular automata.

After graduation I started working in management related jobs, later became an entrepreneur and last year I sold the company; I never really used calculus or computer science since then, actually I used computer science, but never really implemented programs anymore.

After selling the company, I took sometime off to understand more about neural science, cell biology, artificial intelligence and computer science. I am reading all kinds of different stuff. I find fascinating how observations coming from biology and neural science are inspiring many different fields that have been historically separated (physics, engineering, AI, CS, math, etc).

What I found out, is that there are efforts from engineers to export their modeling skills (mainly based on mathematical analysis) to neural science and biology, which is something I instinctively feel is not right. But not having a strong background in math, it was hard for me to even conceptualize these feelings.

Now I am reading a "controversial" book from Stephen Wolfram: A New Kind of Science. Wolfram offers his perspective, which finally helps me understand the big picture; following are a few excerpts from his book:

"It is in a sense surprising that systems [partial differential equations] which involve such a high level of mathematical abstraction should have become so widely used in practice."

"And I suspect that in fact the current predominance of partial differential equations is in many aspects a historical accident - and that had computer technology been developed earlier in the history of mathematics, the situation would now be different."

Maybe Wolfram will come up with the issue of "time" later in the book, but another strong feeling that I have, after reading some cell biology and neural science, is that time should be taken out of the loop, because it does not help much in describing these emergent systems. It actually complicates (again, with the need to resort to partial differential equations) the whole picture.