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I saw an article where they asked a bunch of scientists and engineers if they actually used calculus in their professions. None of them did. They used Excel a

I saw an article where they asked a bunch of scientists and engineers if they actually used calculus in their professions. None of them did. They used Excel and the R programming language.

User23 3y ago
R is a calculus. In fact all programming is reducible to first order predicate calculus. The Leibniz rule is pretty cool.
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
What did they do with Excel and R?
- jskherman 3y ago
  As a chemical engineering student, it's a whole lot of formulas cobbled together to spit out calculations that would otherwise be done on hand (especially empirical methods that compute estimates where a clean answer is not possible like $\int{\frac{\sin{x}}{x}}$). The formulas usually come from what you study in school (e.g. the Redlich-Kwong equation in Physical Chemistry to estimate the properties of real/non-ideal gases). What's neat is that before computers were popular in the early 20th century, these calculations (mostly empirical equations' iterations) had to be done by hand by engineers. So yeah... you can imagine how tedious it was (especially when you have tiny errors due to humans compounding) yet they were still able to build complex things (like factories!).
  - gmadsen 3y ago
    all those formulas were derived using calculus...
  - User23 3y ago
    Engineers didn’t do those calculations by hand. They were done by “computers” who were mostly youngish women with slide rules.
wwarner 3y ago
How you can use R without knowing calculus? Why would you even turn to R if you didn’t have a calculus problem to solve?
- roflyear 3y ago
  You don't use calc much when you use R, unless you're working on a problem that involves calculus, which isn't many problems, usually? R is usually used to do data stuffs in my experience. Like, "take in this data from this CSV, and do these manipulations" which may involve math but not often calculus.
  - wwarner 3y ago
    I am totally for software assisted math. Math isn’t just pencil on paper, and it isn’t only proof, and it’s great to talk about over beers.
  - gmadsen 3y ago
    using those "data stuffs" are usually based on calculus. Statistics and probability are both defined in terms of calculus. calculus is the most basic of mathematical machinery, that it is essentially a requirement to do anything else.
    - thfuran 3y ago
      You're kind of arguing that you can't walk without studying kinematics.
      - gmadsen 3y ago
        im not though. I don't think you need to know measure theory and understand how to formalize probability in terms of sigma algebras to do professional stats. But I would be very skeptical of a professional data scientist that doesn't understand things like derivative, integral, limit on an intuitive level. I don't know how you would understand distributions without that knowledge
bee_rider 3y ago
Calculus is needed to understand, like, basic sophomore and junior year engineering stuff. You can maybe pass the tests without understanding where the models came from if your professors are just really lazy and only give you canned problems, but that isn’t a goal we should strive for. And engineers should usually be using battle-tested models rather than coming up with their own derivations, so to some extent using the calculus day-to-day shouldn’t be necessary in many cases. But it is necessary in order to understand where the models came from. This is what separates engineers from tech-priests.
- cameldrv 3y ago
  I wonder if there’s a way to teach Calculus in a more practical way. I use the principles of Calculus constantly in many aspects of my job, but I don’t think I’ve ever done say, integration by parts professionally. Understanding deeply what an integral and a derivative are is a very useful skill though.
  - bee_rider 3y ago
    As an undergrad I tutored folks in a sort of “calculus for non-STEM students” class that focused more on practical stuff and applications… and TBH I think trying to shield them from the complexity didn’t really do them any favors. I often found that they had some practical algorithm memorized step-by-step and some graphical or conceptual intuition, but when the steps and intuition betrayed them we’d end up spending a while backtracking to find where they lost track of the concrete rules, and then we could work our way forward to catch up to their intuition. Practical results are good guideposts but don’t replace full understanding I think. That’s just my perspective, though, I have a pretty simplistic, algebraic way of looking at math. I could never be a mathematician or see true beauty in math, it is just a bunch of little rules to me. IMO calculus class is fundamentally just relatively abstract compared to the stuff before it. But once you’ve finished it, your engineering and science classes should be full of practical, reinforcing applications, right?
    - rocqua 3y ago
owenpalmer 3y ago
One time I asked an engineer if he used calculus and he said no, so it must not be useful.
ssivark 3y ago
If that were the case, I’d be extremely wary of their scientific output.
bigger_cheese 3y ago
As an engineer calculus is pretty fundamental to my job. It underpins all sorts of stuff - Heat transfer, fluid flow, stress and strain rates, beam deflection, fracture mechanics etc. I may not be solving differential equations by hand but I'm using knowledge about calculus everytime I reason about our industrial process. The excel part is probably referring to solvers - where you plug in boundary conditions and spits out a solution. Edit - and excel or R (or Matlab) is what you use in lieu of needing to solve this stuff by hand.
rcxdude 3y ago
It depends on what the definition of 'using calculus' is, as well. I use the concepts of integration and differentiation all the time in my work: it's completely integral (hah) to a good chunk of what I do (as well as complex numbers, fourier transforms, and a bunch of other 'advanced' maths). What I don't do is grind through working out the analytic solutions to odd integrals or differentials. Firstly because it's rarely useful, and secondly because I have a machine to do that for me in the cases that it is. I think it's unfortunately common to have the attitude that the latter is the majority of what calculus actually is in practice, because it makes up a lot of calculus education, but it's not the case.

I saw an article where they asked a bunch of scientists and engineers if they actually used calculus in their professions. None of them did. They used Excel and the R programming language.

User23 3y ago

R is a calculus. In fact all programming is reducible to first order predicate calculus. The Leibniz rule is pretty cool.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago

What did they do with Excel and R?

jskherman 3y ago
As a chemical engineering student, it's a whole lot of formulas cobbled together to spit out calculations that would otherwise be done on hand (especially empirical methods that compute estimates where a clean answer is not possible like $\int{\frac{\sin{x}}{x}}$). The formulas usually come from what you study in school (e.g. the Redlich-Kwong equation in Physical Chemistry to estimate the properties of real/non-ideal gases). What's neat is that before computers were popular in the early 20th century, these calculations (mostly empirical equations' iterations) had to be done by hand by engineers. So yeah... you can imagine how tedious it was (especially when you have tiny errors due to humans compounding) yet they were still able to build complex things (like factories!).
- gmadsen 3y ago
  all those formulas were derived using calculus...
- User23 3y ago
  Engineers didn’t do those calculations by hand. They were done by “computers” who were mostly youngish women with slide rules.

wwarner 3y ago

How you can use R without knowing calculus? Why would you even turn to R if you didn’t have a calculus problem to solve?

roflyear 3y ago
You don't use calc much when you use R, unless you're working on a problem that involves calculus, which isn't many problems, usually? R is usually used to do data stuffs in my experience. Like, "take in this data from this CSV, and do these manipulations" which may involve math but not often calculus.
- wwarner 3y ago
  I am totally for software assisted math. Math isn’t just pencil on paper, and it isn’t only proof, and it’s great to talk about over beers.
- gmadsen 3y ago
  using those "data stuffs" are usually based on calculus. Statistics and probability are both defined in terms of calculus. calculus is the most basic of mathematical machinery, that it is essentially a requirement to do anything else.
  - thfuran 3y ago
    You're kind of arguing that you can't walk without studying kinematics.
    - gmadsen 3y ago
      im not though. I don't think you need to know measure theory and understand how to formalize probability in terms of sigma algebras to do professional stats. But I would be very skeptical of a professional data scientist that doesn't understand things like derivative, integral, limit on an intuitive level. I don't know how you would understand distributions without that knowledge

bee_rider 3y ago

Calculus is needed to understand, like, basic sophomore and junior year engineering stuff. You can maybe pass the tests without understanding where the models came from if your professors are just really lazy and only give you canned problems, but that isn’t a goal we should strive for. And engineers should usually be using battle-tested models rather than coming up with their own derivations, so to some extent using the calculus day-to-day shouldn’t be necessary in many cases. But it is necessary in order to understand where the models came from. This is what separates engineers from tech-priests.

cameldrv 3y ago
I wonder if there’s a way to teach Calculus in a more practical way. I use the principles of Calculus constantly in many aspects of my job, but I don’t think I’ve ever done say, integration by parts professionally. Understanding deeply what an integral and a derivative are is a very useful skill though.
- bee_rider 3y ago
  As an undergrad I tutored folks in a sort of “calculus for non-STEM students” class that focused more on practical stuff and applications… and TBH I think trying to shield them from the complexity didn’t really do them any favors. I often found that they had some practical algorithm memorized step-by-step and some graphical or conceptual intuition, but when the steps and intuition betrayed them we’d end up spending a while backtracking to find where they lost track of the concrete rules, and then we could work our way forward to catch up to their intuition. Practical results are good guideposts but don’t replace full understanding I think. That’s just my perspective, though, I have a pretty simplistic, algebraic way of looking at math. I could never be a mathematician or see true beauty in math, it is just a bunch of little rules to me. IMO calculus class is fundamentally just relatively abstract compared to the stuff before it. But once you’ve finished it, your engineering and science classes should be full of practical, reinforcing applications, right?
  - rocqua 3y ago

owenpalmer 3y ago

One time I asked an engineer if he used calculus and he said no, so it must not be useful.

ssivark 3y ago

If that were the case, I’d be extremely wary of their scientific output.

bigger_cheese 3y ago

As an engineer calculus is pretty fundamental to my job. It underpins all sorts of stuff - Heat transfer, fluid flow, stress and strain rates, beam deflection, fracture mechanics etc. I may not be solving differential equations by hand but I'm using knowledge about calculus everytime I reason about our industrial process. The excel part is probably referring to solvers - where you plug in boundary conditions and spits out a solution. Edit - and excel or R (or Matlab) is what you use in lieu of needing to solve this stuff by hand.

rcxdude 3y ago

It depends on what the definition of 'using calculus' is, as well. I use the concepts of integration and differentiation all the time in my work: it's completely integral (hah) to a good chunk of what I do (as well as complex numbers, fourier transforms, and a bunch of other 'advanced' maths). What I don't do is grind through working out the analytic solutions to odd integrals or differentials. Firstly because it's rarely useful, and secondly because I have a machine to do that for me in the cases that it is. I think it's unfortunately common to have the attitude that the latter is the majority of what calculus actually is in practice, because it makes up a lot of calculus education, but it's not the case.