I took Calculus in college and stopped there. And while some of it was cool, it mostly felt pointless. Decades later, I'm playing around with some concept at w

I took Calculus in college and stopped there. And while some of it was cool, it mostly felt pointless. Decades later, I'm playing around with some concept at work. I was asked to estimate something, but it was annoying because it depended on multiple things. If one was low and one was high, then the result was low. It was only when neither were low that the result was higher. I could even program a function for it. In a sudden burst of what felt like inspiration, I graphed it out, thinking I could eyeball something, and it was a nice even curve that went up and then back down. I was honestly stuck there for a while. I was eyeballing it and wondering how I could actually figure out where it was at its highest, like exactly. "Huh," said my atrophied brain from college. "You know what's funny, is that the highest point of the curve is also when the line is flat." I stared stupidly at it for a while longer until it finally, finally hit me that I could take the derivative. I still remembered the derivative rule, that part was pretty easy. But coming to the point where I realized I could use it... that took a while. I guess the point is that you get out what you put into math class. You can be drilled on problems but you won't necessarily recognize the situations where you can apply it. (They should probably try and teach that more.) Once that switch clicked on in my brain, I learned to recognize more things like that. Using pre-existing "set" intersection/union functions rather than just slinging arrays. Recognizing when I had a collection of similar linear equations and realizing I could put them in a matrix. And yeah, the occasional derivative. It's "technically correct" that we might not ever NEED these tools in real life, but we're faced with situations where they might be helpful more than we actually realize.