15.4: Chapter Review

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The information in this chapter is not strictly necessary; you can use these methods without knowing much about how they work. But there are two reasons you might want to know.

One reason is pure curiosity. If you use these methods, and especially if you come to rely on them, you might find it unsatisfying to treat them as “black boxes.” At the risk of mixing metaphors, I hope you enjoyed opening the hood.

The other reason is that these methods are not infallible; sometimes things go wrong. If you know how they work, at least in a general sense, you might find it easier to debug them.

With that, you have reached the end of the book, so congratulations! I hope you enjoyed it and learned a lot. I think the tools in this book are useful, and the ways of thinking are important, not just in engineering and science, but in practically every field of inquiry.

Models are the tools we use to understand the world: if you build good models, you are more likely to get things right. Good luck!