This reminds me of a story from all the way back in high school algebra. I had just got a ti-83 calculator that year and was having fun writing basic programs f

This reminds me of a story from all the way back in high school algebra. I had just got a ti-83 calculator that year and was having fun writing basic programs for it. One of the class topics towards the end of the semester was the normal distribution and we were expected to memorize the percentages up to 3 standard deviations. I hated having to remember fixed quantities, so I wrote a program to calculate what I later learned were Riemann sums on the equation for the normal distribution I saw tucked away in the textbook. I wrote a lot of programs like that one throughout high school and into college, and for me it was far more educational to solve a problem once and for through automation than to memorize constants, formulas, or to solve particular instances over and over.