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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
by 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 agoI don't think that any of these benefits are worth the number of hours that people are asked to spend studying calculus
- CoastalCoder 5y agoThe 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 agoI 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.