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> What about calculus [...and...] differential equations ? I agree that calculus and diff. equations techniques are important, but if you look closely, you'll
by ivan_ah 11y ago
> What about calculus [...and...] differential equations ?
I agree that calculus and diff. equations techniques are important, but if you look closely, you'll see they are only "necessary" for engineers and physicists, and other "hard" sciences, and not so essential for non-science studies.
Imagine "pitching" the benefits of learning university-level math to a class of Arts students. Can you honestly say their lives will be improved if they were to learn about a bunch of techniques of integration?
On the other hand, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend learning LA to them. Thinking about operators, vector spaces, dimensions, etc. is applicable much more widely. (I speak from experience here, because I've been "finishing up" the applications chapter in my LA book and I keep finding new applications to cover: balancing chemical equations, electric currents and other network flows, nutrition, least squares approximations, linear programming, cryptography, network coding, error correcting codes, Fourier analysis, prob. theory, and quantum mechanics. The LA party just don't stop ;)
- mooreds 11y agoI remember in my college linear algebra class (I think it was) that my prof made the joke that his wife was the projection of the vector representing all the attributes of his ideal woman into the space that represented the pool of all women who would date him. I thought it was hilarious. Almost made me want to be a math major (I was just a physics major). Which makes me think of: https://www.xkcd.com/435/ https://www.xkcd.com/435/
- paulmd 11y agoI can't decide whether to go for the "null vector" joke or the "yo mamma's magnitude is so great"...
- zeroonetwothree 11y agoI certainly wouldn't pick linear algebra as generally useful for "Arts students". Certainly something like probability or statistics is of much more general benefit to a typical person.
- andrepd 11y ago>quantitative disciplines i.e. not Arts, History or Literature :)