6 ms·

Just curious, how many people here have been taught calculus and never used it? Upvote if you put your hand up.

• forinti 5y ago
  I wonder how many people could have used it and just didn't realise it was the tool they needed.
  • handrous 5y ago
    I really do wonder sometimes if a series of "recognizing which kind of math you need to google" courses would be more useful for the vast majority of people than traditional math courses are, past elementary school. [EDIT] Making the later high school math classes and early university math classes focus entirely on practical application might also be a good idea. I have a feeling it would turn off ~0% people who will eventually become mathematicians, and then the other 200 people in that one mathematician's graduating high school class might actually use what they learned every now and then, once out of school.
    • mywittyname 5y ago
      Isn't that what calculus (the math course) is? I mean, I don't recall the exact recipe for most calculus operations, even though I spent hours in college learning them. But I do know that I can build a taylor series* to approximate certain functions, and that it will be pretty quick and have a bounded error. * Use Wolfram Alpha
      • handrous 5y ago
        Most math classes are kinda that, but you could get a lot more covered if you focused more on "here's a real world problem, 1) what sorts of math do you need to solve it? 2) OK, now solve it and apply the result (you may use the Web, calculators, apps, whatever)" than "here's how you mechanically follow through with that".
  • doopy1 5y ago
    I'm probably in this camp. Was always a techie, but a poor student. Is there a good programmer's guide to calculus that could fill me in on the basics in a few hours, or is it really one of those things that takes a full college semester?
• CoastalCoder 5y ago
  My need for it has waned and waxed over my career and life: - Understanding the ideas behind derivatives / gradients and integrals has let me grasp some basic concepts regarding physical systems and regarding money. - I've helped some physicists turn their ideas into C++ code, and knowing a little calculus narrowed the communications gap. - In deep learning systems, if I didn't already know some basic calculus, understanding auto-differentiation and back-propagation would have seemed like an insurmountable challenge.
  • hooande 5y ago
    I don't think that any of these benefits are worth the number of hours that people are asked to spend studying calculus
    • CoastalCoder 5y ago
      The benefits that I personally have reaped from studying calculus justify the time and effort that I personally have invested. I'm not qualified to guess how universal my experience is.
    • pjbeam 5y ago
      I personally enjoyed analysis for its own sake. The calc sequence was a bit silly, like a cookbook, but there are some cool ideas in there that I still enjoy thinking about. Math maturity that came out of that (and others, especially number theory) has served me well as a conceptual framework in all kinds of disparate areas of my life.
• digitalsushi 5y ago
  Learning calculus forced me to learn how to learn, which I use everyday. Maybe something else would have eventually taught me how to learn, but for me, calculus was my first experience of being able to tell myself I was right instead of relying on someone else to tell me I was right.
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    Learning calculus also taught me that it is possible for me to learn something that isn't "obvious" as soon as I see it and that if I try hard enough, I can understand something I don't think I can understand rather than giving up immediately because it's hard.
• tombert 5y ago
  Ok, I'll bite. I find these questions a bit strange, because it sort of misses the point of learning as a whole. Do I use Civil War history every day? No, probably not, but I also don't regret being taught it at school. Am I conducting a lot of chemical experiments? No, but I think it's valid for me to have learned chemistry in high school. Am I performing literary analysis on everything I consume? Well, yes, but that's just something I do for fun, it's not like people are paying me for it. The reason that they teach calculus is two fold. First, most of this stuff is somewhat additive. Do you use "calculus" every day? Probably not, but having learned calculus might make other aspects of math or programming easier, stuff that you might end up using full time. Second, the people designing programs for Computer Science degrees (and probably others as well) at some level need to have a "one size fits all" for their students. My professor doesn't know if I'm going to get a job doing video game physics, if I'm going to designing video compression filters, or if I'm going to be a web developer, but they want to make sure that if I graduate with a CS degree, I am more or less qualified for most reasonable software engineering positions, or least given the tools to become qualified. We could extrapolate this logic further: how many people here are realistically writing low-level C code? I know I'm not, but I don't regret them teaching me how it's done, it informs my high-level code writing.
  • gjs278 5y ago
    maybe they should have taught you brevity as well
• handrous 5y ago
  I'm not sure I've ever used anything more complex than Algebra 1 from IIRC freshman year of high school. Ever. Certainly I'm more likely to go beyond that doing house projects, than at work. I think I've used trig once or twice for house projects, but by "used" I mean "plugged some numbers into the relevant calculator, without needing to actually know the formula", and if that counts I guess I also do advanced cryptography and all kinds of other crazy stuff daily, like when I used GPS or access a web page over SSL. Far and away the most useful math I was taught in school was the memorization of basic "math facts" (e.g. multiplication tables), including and especially the ability to do mental math with fractions and percentages. This is the stuff (rote memorization) that professional mathematicians seem to hate and want to get rid of or downplay, even calling it "not actually math" et c. Easily the best use of my time in any math class, ever, though I didn't know it at the time. As far as any utility it had in "shaping my mind", my four semesters of college French were at least as useful for that as my... oh, I dunno, 28 semesters of math? Youtube and reading blogs has been more useful for developing my mind in the way people usually mean when they say that's what learning math's good for, even if you don't use it. I also never use that [edit: the French, I mean] unfortunately, so like math, I've lost almost all of it. I'd guess 99% of the math I use in a given year could be done by an average 5th grader. Every now and then I take a stab at (re-)learning some math, but it's just so hard to justify the time. What am I going to do with it, really, unless I put in thousands of study-hours to get really good at some niche? Nothing. So I usually end up distracted by some fun-but-not-enlightening recreational math, which is fine, but about as improving as solving Sudoku puzzles. Paid software developer since age 15, BS degree in computer science, approaching age 40.
  • tombert 5y ago
    > This is the stuff (rote memorization) that professional mathematicians seem to hate and want to get rid of or downplay, even calling it "not actually math" I'm not a mathematician, but my understanding of them saying that is because that's more computation than mathematical thinking. You're not getting an understanding of what's actually happening when you've memorized 4x5=20, all you're doing is creating basic word-mapping. Maybe I just lived a very different life, but even though I'm reasonably good with my times tables, I still almost always use a calculator/spreadsheet/spotlight/phone to do all but the most basic of computations. Why wouldn't I? I always have a supercomputer in my pocket that is substantially more likely to be correct than a twenty year old memory of fourth grade. > I'd guess 99% of the math I use in a given year could be done by an average 5th grader. I don't mean to come off as a jerk, but I guess I'm just going to say it; in the 25 years you've been a developer, have you not tried to make a game? Some machine learning? Data science? I'm not saying you need to be the next Guass or anything, but all of those require more advanced math than what I was taught in fifth grade. To make a platformer game, you have to know enough to do a basic Euler integration. To do machine learning, you have to know enough to at least know what a Sigmoid is [1]. To do data science, you have to understand basic statistical methods (E.g. ANOVA, Chi Squared, Student T Tests). Maybe you were taught all this stuff in fifth grade, but I don't think that the majority of students where. [1] I don't do machine learning for a living, I know that the Sigmoid has fallen out of favor but I think my point still stands.
• stocknoob 5y ago
  https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-teacher https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/why-i-couldn39t-be-a-math-...
• chmod775 5y ago
  That's a weird thing to ask on a site full of software developers, even if most people here probably spend their time writing some angular or react site that's a thin layer over a mongodb database and has hardly any 'meat' to it. If you haven't used something from calculus (or other branch of mathematics beyond grade school stuff) in this sector, you've either been avoiding it or had others do the work for you on stackoverflow or something. You can't even have big O notation without calculus.
• mywittyname 5y ago
  It's not an everyday thing for me, but I've made frequent use of series and differentiation in my career and worked with people who used it for a living. It depends on what you do. One will absolutely run into calc doing any sort of scientific computing, simulations, signal processing, machine learning, or graphics programming. But you can absolutely make a good living in software knowing no calculus.
• abd888 5y ago
  It is a bit outdated. Its useful only on certain optimization problems that in the real world get solved with simpler methods.
  • NikolaeVarius 5y ago
    In what universe is goddamn CALCULUS outdated. As long the reality consists of things changing in relation to other things, it remains modern.
    • onychomys 5y ago
      Well, it's now pretty easy to get really close to a continuous answer by using discrete steps in a computer. If you need to get the area under a curve by breaking it into a billion tiny rectangles, so what, your computer will do that calculation in a second or two. (...that being said, calculus is a lot more than just a way to calculate, it's a whole method of thinking of the world, and that's clearly not outdated quite yet)
      • nybble41 5y ago
        > If you need to get the area under a curve by breaking it into a billion tiny rectangles, so what, your computer will do that calculation in a second or two. That, too, is calculus. However, a closed-form solution will always be preferred—"a second or two" might be acceptable if you're only evaluating the function once, but it's clearly not good enough when you're applying it to a large data set. We may all be carrying around supercomputers in our pockets but we're still well short of the point where that kind of optimization wouldn't lead to a noticeable increase in both performance and (practical) functionality.
• pfisherman 5y ago
  Eh… it’s pretty useful if you want to do deep learning. I would also consider a strong facility with concepts like of rates of change / derivatives and aggregation / integration to be a an important practical skill. Imo, they we should be teaching basic linear algebra before calculus. Multiplying vectors and matrices by hand gives a very good feel for how integrals work.
• waterhouse 5y ago
  I used it once in financial projections at work: assuming the customer base would continue to double every six months, and that each customer generated data at a constant rate, and using integration to compute the total storage needed. I might have also used it when taking depreciation and inflation into account. Technically, though, I learned that calculus from a textbook, rather than by being taught.