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Let me know, not if anyone here can do Calculus (that is ordinary; who can't?), but rather whether you actually personally use Calculus, and please describe gen

Let me know, not if anyone here can do Calculus (that is ordinary; who can't?), but rather whether you actually personally use Calculus, and please describe generally an example of needing Calculus to figure something out in the last 5 years. I think my point is that the history of mathematics is exponentially more interesting than mathematics. We like mathematics, but we like stories far more than we like whatever mathematics is. Mythology > Mathematics

cycomanic 4y ago
I do calculations on Maxwells equations all the time, that's s calculus. Doing CAD, or any finite element calculations - > calculus. Modern engineering would not be possible without calculus. Just because software engineers mostly use linear algebra, doesn't mean that most other technical disciplines are the same.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > Modern engineering would not be possible without calculus. Was not my question. Nearly everyone uses computers. Computers would not be possible without electronics. How many computer users work with Maxwell's Equations or have even heard of Kirchhoff's circuit laws? A very tiny percentage, undoubtedly. The reason I asked was the Penn State professor's epiphany that no engineer among the many he asked actually used calculus.
  - noobermin 4y ago
    How many programmers use linked lists? I just use the list type in python, it's just "list" not a "linked list". I don't have to deal with individual nodes or pointers. I don't have learn sorting algorithms, I just use list.sort or sorted.
SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago
Do tools that use calculus count? If so, switch-mode power supply design uses quite a bit, mostly differential equations. I let the CAD software do the numeric simulations, but there's always some hand calculation needed to pick initial component values.
- Maursault 4y ago
  If I asked if you ever use arithmetic, and you asked me if using calculators counts, what do you think my answer would be?
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    Well, the answer should be yes. Otherwise you would have to conclude very few people use arithmetic in their work which seems peculiar. A tool based on calculus could be rather abstracted from the math though and the user not even know they are using calculus.
whimsicalism 4y ago
> that is ordinary; who can't? In my experience, almost everyone out of college who I've met who claims to know calculus.
- Maursault 4y ago
  LOL! undergraduates think they know everything... yada yada yada
- kuhewa 4y ago
  At least if you've actually learned the concept of derivatives and integrals, it wouldn't be that hard to refresh enough for a given use case. I'd agree that most of us that have taken a year of university calculus don't know calculus.
kuhewa 4y ago
To your second point, I would disagree that we learn maths that we may likely never directly use not because of historical fascination, but because progressively expanding student's mathematical knowledge serves the purpose of meta-learning, learning to learn. As to your question I've touched on a little for manipulation of some of the classic equations in ecology and population biology, growth curves, population growth, etc. Barely needed to crack an introductory textbook to do it though. Had I learned real calculus and maybe differential equations there is some really interesting modelling I'd be able to do in this space, but instead I'm stuck seeing the diffuse shadow of the idea on the wall of Plato's cave. That's not a wistful lament though because to your point, time spent boning up on linear algebra instead of calculus would provide at least an order of magnitude more utility for my work.
- Maursault 4y ago
  > To your second point, I would disagree that we learn maths that we may likely never directly use not because of historical fascination That was not my point. No one learns math because of historical fascination. The point was simply the stories about the math are more interesting than the math itself, which isn't any stretch of the imagination.
  - kuhewa 4y ago
    That's comparing a tool to an insight though, like sure 'grammar' isn't as interesting as a poem. Math is interesting because despite being axiomatic there are all of these emergent things it can correctly predict about the world. To mix metaphors, there are very interesting stories that are at least in part in the grammar of math.
jbay808 4y ago
I use calculus quite a lot, basically any time I need to go beyond an existing solution I could look up in a textbook. That is, all the interesting problems! For example in writing this article, especially details in footnotes 4 and 13: https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/voiding-the-warranty-how-the-kalman https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/voiding-the-warranty-how... When I want to write or tune a Kalman filter or some other control system, I need to work out the differential equations that govern a system, often from first principles if the system isn't a simple textbook example like an inverted pendulum. Sometimes I need to design that system myself or find out what change to its dynamics will fix a noise problem (eg. add a capacitor here, etc), and without an understanding of calculus I would be searching in the dark or stuck trying to look up known solutions in textbooks. It also comes up a lot when I want to do probability or statistical calculations, because I end up needing to integrate various functions or products of functions to find means / medians / covariances / etc. Sometimes I can get away with leaning on Mathematica to do those integrals for me, but sometimes I can't, like when one of those functions is an arbitrary input like f(x). Even when I can use Mathematica to perform the integral, I need to know calculus for that to be any clearer than a magic spell. Without knowing calculus, how would I ever guess that I can solve my problem by typing "ln(x0-a)/arctan(x + a)" into wolfram alpha and then plotting the result? Recently I had the need to do work backwards: find the function that satisfies certain properties like - being smooth and monotonic, zero at the origin, having a certain area within certain bounds, having a certain covariance, nowhere going to infinity, etc. This sounds very abstract but was the key to cracking a concrete signal processing problem. And then there's all the optimization work, where I need to write numerical code that will look for the maxima or minima of some unknown function, to eg. design the best possible motor you can pack into a box of certain size and weight. 3rd-party libraries are certainly helpful but I usually find I need to supplement them with domain logic to keep it from getting stuck in a local optimum or rule out physically impossible search spaces. A few months ago I needed to write a finite-element solver to handle soft, thin woven fabrics, where the material can support tension but not compression stresses and the material properties are different depending on the axis of the weave. I would have been at a total loss to get that done without calculus. Even when I am pulling something out of a textbook, most engineering textbooks past the first-year-undergraduate level will presume some familiarity with calculus. Not to mention properly thinking about current issues like inflation, CO2 emissions, etc, where the discussion bounces back and forth between integral and derivative quantities. I'm not even a "math guy". I didn't do well in math in school, and I always struggle a lot to learn new math until I have an application in mind that I need it for. It's only because of how often I need it for my projects that I've ended up learning a lot of math, not the other way around.
drbeast 4y ago
I can't. Promptly forgot it all which is why I will never bother to go get a graduate degree.
abdullahkhalids 4y ago
In my personal life, if I talk about the economy with someone, or listen to an expert talk about it, I use the conceptual framework of calculus to evaluate the relations between quantities. For instance, understanding changes in demand of various products in the face of inflation based on the price sensitivity of those products.
watwut 4y ago
I did a module for calculating financial figures and values in work. Knowing calculus was very useful - both to understand what I am doing and to figure simplifications where possible. Imo, history of mathematics is not interesting unless you are interested in mathematics itself too. It is sort of stuff that some people good in math and interested in care about, but is otherwise completely uninteresting for anybody else. Unless you turn it into history tabloid. Which you can do in pretty much any field, but also it will loose any meaning. At that point, you can do paris Hilton or Kayne West.

cycomanic 4y ago

I do calculations on Maxwells equations all the time, that's s calculus. Doing CAD, or any finite element calculations - > calculus. Modern engineering would not be possible without calculus. Just because software engineers mostly use linear algebra, doesn't mean that most other technical disciplines are the same.

Maursault 4y ago
> Modern engineering would not be possible without calculus. Was not my question. Nearly everyone uses computers. Computers would not be possible without electronics. How many computer users work with Maxwell's Equations or have even heard of Kirchhoff's circuit laws? A very tiny percentage, undoubtedly. The reason I asked was the Penn State professor's epiphany that no engineer among the many he asked actually used calculus.
- noobermin 4y ago
  How many programmers use linked lists? I just use the list type in python, it's just "list" not a "linked list". I don't have to deal with individual nodes or pointers. I don't have learn sorting algorithms, I just use list.sort or sorted.

SAI_Peregrinus 4y ago

Do tools that use calculus count? If so, switch-mode power supply design uses quite a bit, mostly differential equations. I let the CAD software do the numeric simulations, but there's always some hand calculation needed to pick initial component values.

Maursault 4y ago
If I asked if you ever use arithmetic, and you asked me if using calculators counts, what do you think my answer would be?
- kuhewa 4y ago
  Well, the answer should be yes. Otherwise you would have to conclude very few people use arithmetic in their work which seems peculiar. A tool based on calculus could be rather abstracted from the math though and the user not even know they are using calculus.

whimsicalism 4y ago

> that is ordinary; who can't? In my experience, almost everyone out of college who I've met who claims to know calculus.

Maursault 4y ago
LOL! undergraduates think they know everything... yada yada yada
kuhewa 4y ago
At least if you've actually learned the concept of derivatives and integrals, it wouldn't be that hard to refresh enough for a given use case. I'd agree that most of us that have taken a year of university calculus don't know calculus.

kuhewa 4y ago

To your second point, I would disagree that we learn maths that we may likely never directly use not because of historical fascination, but because progressively expanding student's mathematical knowledge serves the purpose of meta-learning, learning to learn. As to your question I've touched on a little for manipulation of some of the classic equations in ecology and population biology, growth curves, population growth, etc. Barely needed to crack an introductory textbook to do it though. Had I learned real calculus and maybe differential equations there is some really interesting modelling I'd be able to do in this space, but instead I'm stuck seeing the diffuse shadow of the idea on the wall of Plato's cave. That's not a wistful lament though because to your point, time spent boning up on linear algebra instead of calculus would provide at least an order of magnitude more utility for my work.

Maursault 4y ago
> To your second point, I would disagree that we learn maths that we may likely never directly use not because of historical fascination That was not my point. No one learns math because of historical fascination. The point was simply the stories about the math are more interesting than the math itself, which isn't any stretch of the imagination.
- kuhewa 4y ago
  That's comparing a tool to an insight though, like sure 'grammar' isn't as interesting as a poem. Math is interesting because despite being axiomatic there are all of these emergent things it can correctly predict about the world. To mix metaphors, there are very interesting stories that are at least in part in the grammar of math.

jbay808 4y ago

I use calculus quite a lot, basically any time I need to go beyond an existing solution I could look up in a textbook. That is, all the interesting problems! For example in writing this article, especially details in footnotes 4 and 13: https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/voiding-the-warranty-how-the-kalman https://jbconsulting.substack.com/p/voiding-the-warranty-how... When I want to write or tune a Kalman filter or some other control system, I need to work out the differential equations that govern a system, often from first principles if the system isn't a simple textbook example like an inverted pendulum. Sometimes I need to design that system myself or find out what change to its dynamics will fix a noise problem (eg. add a capacitor here, etc), and without an understanding of calculus I would be searching in the dark or stuck trying to look up known solutions in textbooks. It also comes up a lot when I want to do probability or statistical calculations, because I end up needing to integrate various functions or products of functions to find means / medians / covariances / etc. Sometimes I can get away with leaning on Mathematica to do those integrals for me, but sometimes I can't, like when one of those functions is an arbitrary input like f(x). Even when I can use Mathematica to perform the integral, I need to know calculus for that to be any clearer than a magic spell. Without knowing calculus, how would I ever guess that I can solve my problem by typing "ln(x0-a)/arctan(x + a)" into wolfram alpha and then plotting the result? Recently I had the need to do work backwards: find the function that satisfies certain properties like - being smooth and monotonic, zero at the origin, having a certain area within certain bounds, having a certain covariance, nowhere going to infinity, etc. This sounds very abstract but was the key to cracking a concrete signal processing problem. And then there's all the optimization work, where I need to write numerical code that will look for the maxima or minima of some unknown function, to eg. design the best possible motor you can pack into a box of certain size and weight. 3rd-party libraries are certainly helpful but I usually find I need to supplement them with domain logic to keep it from getting stuck in a local optimum or rule out physically impossible search spaces. A few months ago I needed to write a finite-element solver to handle soft, thin woven fabrics, where the material can support tension but not compression stresses and the material properties are different depending on the axis of the weave. I would have been at a total loss to get that done without calculus. Even when I am pulling something out of a textbook, most engineering textbooks past the first-year-undergraduate level will presume some familiarity with calculus. Not to mention properly thinking about current issues like inflation, CO2 emissions, etc, where the discussion bounces back and forth between integral and derivative quantities. I'm not even a "math guy". I didn't do well in math in school, and I always struggle a lot to learn new math until I have an application in mind that I need it for. It's only because of how often I need it for my projects that I've ended up learning a lot of math, not the other way around.

drbeast 4y ago

I can't. Promptly forgot it all which is why I will never bother to go get a graduate degree.

abdullahkhalids 4y ago

In my personal life, if I talk about the economy with someone, or listen to an expert talk about it, I use the conceptual framework of calculus to evaluate the relations between quantities. For instance, understanding changes in demand of various products in the face of inflation based on the price sensitivity of those products.

watwut 4y ago

I did a module for calculating financial figures and values in work. Knowing calculus was very useful - both to understand what I am doing and to figure simplifications where possible. Imo, history of mathematics is not interesting unless you are interested in mathematics itself too. It is sort of stuff that some people good in math and interested in care about, but is otherwise completely uninteresting for anybody else. Unless you turn it into history tabloid. Which you can do in pretty much any field, but also it will loose any meaning. At that point, you can do paris Hilton or Kayne West.