The Art of Approximation in Science and Engineering
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this course on order-of-magnitude reasoning for complex problems. It covers techniques including divide and conquer, dimensional analysis, extreme-case reasoning, continuity, scaling, successive approximation, balancing, cheap calculus, and symmetry, teaching students to estimate answers before calculating exact ones. Applications range across physics, biology, mathematics, and engineering, with examples such as bird and machine flight, neuron biophysics, weather prediction, prime number distribution, and animal locomotion. The course emphasizes low-cost, hands-on experiments to test rough hypotheses and build intuition about real-world phenomena. Materials include lecture notes, problem sets, and readings from MIT's OpenCourseWare archive, developed for the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering departments. No paid certificate track is mentioned; all materials are freely accessible. The approach suits students who want practical estimation skills applicable across scientific and engineering disciplines rather than a single narrow topic.