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I don't use Calculus every day, but the whole "stop thinking about specific Y-values and start thinking about how functions behave together and influence each o
by krinchan 11y ago
I don't use Calculus every day, but the whole "stop thinking about specific Y-values and start thinking about how functions behave together and influence each other" is just invaluable in a world ruled by numbers that are in constant flux.
To be honest though, I always thought that Linear Algebra would've been a much better AP class than Calculus. Sure Calculus naturally follows Trigonometry, but Linear Algebra has the same sort of "teaches these critical thinking skills" effect and, more importantly to me, was much more visual and easier to get excited about. Especially when our class started futzing about with OpenGL and particle fountains towards the end of the class.
- notalaser 11y agoYeah, I was pretty upset at this, too. In high school, I was taught a very washed-down form of linear algebra (very basic vector and matrix operations), and then in uni, calculus and linear algebra were taught at the same time. I made up for it pretty much by going over a linear algebra textbook all by myself, again, in my 3rd year of university. I get to use Calculus pretty often because I regularly do both hardware and software work (perks of having an EE degree; according to my diploma, I'm an intruder and should not be allowed to touch computers :-) ). Analog systems have continuous-valued inputs and outputs and you can't really describe those without Calc, and in mixed-signal systems you often describe various properties of the discrete signals by starting from their continuous counterpart.