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I went to school for mechanical engineering (though I now work in software). We were required to take signals and systems, but if I remember right it was a weed-out course for most MechEs (it certainly was a challenge for me, though I think that had more to do with the curriculum than the topic).

Those lessons might have been hard-won on my part, but I definitely still use them. The general concepts (feedback loops etc) are applicable basically everywhere in life, and I still find uses for literal actual math (like using a convolution kernel to do rolling window sampling in numpy).




I can imagine it's used for car suspension?


That's not considered signals and systems, at least not where I went to school (unless you're talking about fully-active suspensions, but those are very rare and highly specialized). Rather, that would be down the "dynamics" course progression -- which is bread and butter for MechEs in those lines of work. That's also extremely useful, but it's generally a different subject matter, at least until you get into graduate-level dynamics combined with upper-undergrad-to-graduate-level numerical methods.


Vibration isolation can definitely be thought of within a systems framework, although it's perhaps overkill for passive filtering as you won't be doing much in the way of feedback.


Wasn't control theory invented to understand the dynamic behavior of steam engine governors?




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