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The benefit of calculus isn’t about the ability to write things down on paper in a fancy code and playing a game to solve it. The benefit is that it paints your

The benefit of calculus isn’t about the ability to write things down on paper in a fancy code and playing a game to solve it. The benefit is that it paints your waking reality in a color you weren’t aware you could observe previously: curves, and expectation, and prediction. Based on your take here, I’m gonna guess that you’re in but haven’t yet graduated college. I’m not sure how you’re going to suggest “learning programming” rather than learning calculus, as calculus is a foundational element of all modern languages. For loops are a further generalization of Leibniz notation, in a rough but very real fashion. You can only understand a car so deeply without brushing up against physics, the study of which is classically explained by (you guessed it). Sure, you can argue that “you don’t need physics to understand a car well enough to fix it.” Okay, congrats on mastering the adult version of putting the right shaped block into the right shaped hole. Understanding music really doesn’t require a ton of calculus, unless you want to go into building instruments and music software. If you want to do sound design, you’re also fucked, because understanding Fourier transforms is an important aspect of being a good design engineer. To me, it sounds like you failed calculus twice and now are trying to prevent people from sharing in your grief. That’s less admirable than you think—-it’s not that calculus is fundamentally hard without reward or merit, it’s likely that somebody failed to indicate to you the importance of calculus.

pdonis 4y ago
You are giving plenty of ways in which calculus can be useful. But the GP wasn't arguing against claims that calculus is useful. The GP was arguing against a claim that calculus was useless, but you should study it anyway as "weightlifting for your brain". Your arguments about how calculus is useful would be better directed at the teacher the GP was arguing against.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- raydiatian 4y ago
  > But the GP wasn't arguing against claims that calculus is useful. So no clue who GP is. Grandparent is my best guess. And with respect to you, that would be the guy I was responding to, but that couldn’t possibly be correct because he said > rather than sitting on your butt learning a useless subject From context, inferred to be calculus, esp because > took me 3 semesters of Calculus to figure out that it was useless to me and 90+% of the people that take any of it Soooo… who is GP
  - pdonis 4y ago
    "GP" is Hacker News lingo for "the grandparent post to this one", which in the post I made responding to you before, means the post you were responding to.
Tainnor 4y ago
> I’m not sure how you’re going to suggest “learning programming” rather than learning calculus, as calculus is a foundational element of all modern languages. For loops are a further generalization of Leibniz notation, in a rough but very real fashion. Eh, I'm pretty much opposed to GP's assessment that calculus is useless; in fact, it is probably one of the biggest intellectual achievements of the past couple centuries and modern society would be unimaginable without it. But I don't really see the connection with programming. Programming/CS is mostly discrete maths and little calculus (with some exceptions, like complexity theory, because it's just easier to talk about functions R -> R than Z -> Z, and numerical analysis, which is about how nice theorems break down when you have to work with messy approximations instead of the real values). Calculus is about the real numbers and we can't even encode the majority of real numbers on computers.
- raydiatian 4y ago
  > I really don’t see the connection with programming It may just be the stupid way my brain is wired. When I think about calculus I can’t help but also consider programming, and vice versa. Okay, Calculus is not a precursor to learning to code. But the DNA of calculus is definitely there. First, how building blocks of programming and calculus are similar. 1) We can probably throw out the control flow concepts, although they vaguely map to the notion of intervals on evaluated integrals. 2) I said for loops are a generalization of Leibniz notation. I also said it’s a rough relation. You said you don’t see the parallel because you claim pure maths calculus deals with reals and computers are discrete. Yep. Real numbers are discrete at the infinitesimal limit (grab your torch and pitchforks). I hope this is enough explanation on that front. Loops roughly = integrals. It’s purely theoretical. I get that you can’t actually represent an infinite precision real using bytes. Next, algorithms. 1) I think there’s another very loose but valuable perspective in which calculus and efficient algorithm implementation at least shop at the same grocery store, if not fool around on the down low. I can imagine every possible implementation for solving the knapsack problem as being distributed in a higher dimensional space. There are a ton of bad ones out there with dogshit runtimes. But somewhere near the middle is one that goes zoooooom. That’s an optimization problem—that’s calculus. 2) And then within solving a problem itself. The *good* solutions make use of derivative-like notions. Properties about the problem which you use to solve it efficiently are effective pseudo-derivatives. The way that you can use a derivative plus a point to approximate some next point forward, you can use problem topology plus current state to improve state a bit further until you converge upon an “answer”. The list goes on. Calculus is in programming and programming is in calculus. They are cross-pollenated dialects of the mother tongue of the universe.

pdonis 4y ago

You are giving plenty of ways in which calculus can be useful. But the GP wasn't arguing against claims that calculus is useful. The GP was arguing against a claim that calculus was useless, but you should study it anyway as "weightlifting for your brain". Your arguments about how calculus is useful would be better directed at the teacher the GP was arguing against.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
raydiatian 4y ago
> But the GP wasn't arguing against claims that calculus is useful. So no clue who GP is. Grandparent is my best guess. And with respect to you, that would be the guy I was responding to, but that couldn’t possibly be correct because he said > rather than sitting on your butt learning a useless subject From context, inferred to be calculus, esp because > took me 3 semesters of Calculus to figure out that it was useless to me and 90+% of the people that take any of it Soooo… who is GP
- pdonis 4y ago
  "GP" is Hacker News lingo for "the grandparent post to this one", which in the post I made responding to you before, means the post you were responding to.

Tainnor 4y ago

> I’m not sure how you’re going to suggest “learning programming” rather than learning calculus, as calculus is a foundational element of all modern languages. For loops are a further generalization of Leibniz notation, in a rough but very real fashion. Eh, I'm pretty much opposed to GP's assessment that calculus is useless; in fact, it is probably one of the biggest intellectual achievements of the past couple centuries and modern society would be unimaginable without it. But I don't really see the connection with programming. Programming/CS is mostly discrete maths and little calculus (with some exceptions, like complexity theory, because it's just easier to talk about functions R -> R than Z -> Z, and numerical analysis, which is about how nice theorems break down when you have to work with messy approximations instead of the real values). Calculus is about the real numbers and we can't even encode the majority of real numbers on computers.

raydiatian 4y ago
> I really don’t see the connection with programming It may just be the stupid way my brain is wired. When I think about calculus I can’t help but also consider programming, and vice versa. Okay, Calculus is not a precursor to learning to code. But the DNA of calculus is definitely there. First, how building blocks of programming and calculus are similar. 1) We can probably throw out the control flow concepts, although they vaguely map to the notion of intervals on evaluated integrals. 2) I said for loops are a generalization of Leibniz notation. I also said it’s a rough relation. You said you don’t see the parallel because you claim pure maths calculus deals with reals and computers are discrete. Yep. Real numbers are discrete at the infinitesimal limit (grab your torch and pitchforks). I hope this is enough explanation on that front. Loops roughly = integrals. It’s purely theoretical. I get that you can’t actually represent an infinite precision real using bytes. Next, algorithms. 1) I think there’s another very loose but valuable perspective in which calculus and efficient algorithm implementation at least shop at the same grocery store, if not fool around on the down low. I can imagine every possible implementation for solving the knapsack problem as being distributed in a higher dimensional space. There are a ton of bad ones out there with dogshit runtimes. But somewhere near the middle is one that goes zoooooom. That’s an optimization problem—that’s calculus. 2) And then within solving a problem itself. The *good* solutions make use of derivative-like notions. Properties about the problem which you use to solve it efficiently are effective pseudo-derivatives. The way that you can use a derivative plus a point to approximate some next point forward, you can use problem topology plus current state to improve state a bit further until you converge upon an “answer”. The list goes on. Calculus is in programming and programming is in calculus. They are cross-pollenated dialects of the mother tongue of the universe.