Mapping out MIT's Nuclear Science and Engineering program

What makes up one of the top University's nuclear science and engineering program?

At the start of this week, I had asked the question of what mathematics is required to become a nuclear engineer? Naturally, you probe the internet for answers. The previous posts about this question yielded a low resolution, high-level answer.

Sweet, you need to learn calculus? What kind of calculus? Single variate? Multivariate? Physics? Well that obvious, isn’t it? But what parts of physics do you need to learn? Quantum mechanics? Will Classical mechanics do?

These answers bore more questions than before. At this stage, I remembered looking at 22.02 Introduction to Applied Nuclear Physics from MIT’s open-course website, OpenCourseWare (I wanted to learn about what nuclear physics is). Knowing this, it meant MIT had something on nuclear engineering and science…which they have as a major.

Perfect! Lets examine the course and the subjects that make it up!

Using MIT’s Catalog and OCW, I began dissecting the handbook and courses, and reconstructing it in my notes to reference in the future. Each reconstruction held basic information on the content studied for that course and a link to their respective OCW course (else, it was a link to the catalog). This will be make it easy to study the material and contents in a more ordered approach.

Next, using the Excalidraw plugin in Obsidian, I began mapping out the course by linking each subject to one another based on pre-requisites and co-requisites. It is still a work in progress but it makes the course clearer (there is a second approach being attempted where instead of a “left-to-right” flow chart of sorts, it begins in the middle of concentric circles and expands outwards - poorly written but in the future, you’ll know what I mean).

I have yet to add the electives, which I am figuring out how I will do it. Other than that, cleaning this graph would, I imagine, be very beneficial to people, who could see how their program is set up.

The graph is great because, so far, it tells me I have to get myself set up for 18.01 Single Variable Calculus and 8.01 Physics I: Classical Mechanics, at least from a mathematics point of view.

For me, the next step for the image is adding the rest of the General Institute Requirements into their respective box, among other things, and, behind the scenes, finishing off missing information for each subject. Please let know if you would want to see other components added to the graph.

For now, thank you for joining me in graphing the course. Hope to see you for the next post.

Steve Frampton.