"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett That's the thesis of Dr. Bartlet

"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." - Dr. Albert A. Bartlett That's the thesis of Dr. Bartlett's famous lecture "Arithmetic, Population and Energy": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 Calculus is foundational for understanding our rapidly changing, data-driven world. It gives us the ability to see. You can apply calculus anytime you have a quantity that's changing over time, and you want to see where things are going, how things are changing, and when something is going to happen based on its rate of change -- e.g. stocks, startup growth metrics, how an idea is spreading, mass-market adoption, etc -- anytime you have time-series data and you want to see what it means -- make sense out of it, and understand its implications. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculus#Applications And Calculus gives you the ability to calculate how lifelong learning can impact your growth over time -- the significance it can have throughout your life/career -- and realize it's never too late to learn anything ;-) In the words of Prof John Ousterhout: "A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of y-intercept." https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs142-spring12/weekendThoughts.php https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/cs142-spring12/week...