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Who here has used middle or high school algebra as an adult within the last year? Personally, I haven't used algebra, calculus, or trigonometry one bit, not on
by dventimi 3y ago
Who here has used middle or high school algebra as an adult within the last year?
Personally, I haven't used algebra, calculus, or trigonometry one bit, not once, either in a personal or professional setting, in at least the last five years. FWIW, I'm a physicist who moved on to software engineering, then machine learning, then management.
- gnicholas 3y agoAlgebra? Sure. Never used trig, but have thought about calculus from time to time. For some students (those who plan to major in humanities, or some social sciences), taking calc in HS seems to be more of a signaling devices than anything else.
- dventimi 3y agoI guess I must be the only one in a STEM field not using algebra, trigonometry, or calculus in my job. Evidently, everyone else is putting pen to paper routinely to reduce equations, compute geometric relations, and find integrals.
- brailsafe 3y agoYou managed to not use calculus or algebra, even indirectly through having an intuitive understanding of it, during your time as a physicist or software engineer in machine learning?
- dventimi 3y agoIt's been ten years since I moved into software engineering. It's been five years since I moved into data science and then machine learning. No. At no point in that interval did I ever sit down with pen and paper and "do algebra", something I did routinely in twelve years in science.
- brailsafe 3y agoBased on your other replies it seems like you have a fairly specific idea of what it means to use those categories of math. I doubt many people are literally putting pen to paper to work out equations manually, but that's probably not what many people would think of when considering whether they are making use of knowledge. If I say "I haven't taken notes, they've never helped in software dev" but just meant that I've never used a pen to write notes on paper, instead choosing a text file, that's a bit misleading.
- dventimi 3y agoThere's no need to infer what I mean from my comments because I'll say explicitly what I mean. I mean literally putting pen or pencil to paper, or chalk to a chalkboard, or marker to whiteboard, because if we're talking about algebra and high schools, that's the algebra American kids are taught to do in high school. At least, I was thirty years ago and my daughter was three years ago. That may not be what other people think of when they say they use the knowledge they learned in high school algebra, but I'm not obliged to think in their terms (the obverse is also obviously true).
- gnicholas 3y agoOne does not need to put a pen to paper in order to think about how linear functions scale, how they differ from nonlinear functions, etc. These are things you learn in Algebra class, and which are useful for thinking about (and calculating by hand, when precision is necessary) many aspects of life. One example: at my kids' school, they care mostly about whether a student is at grade level. If a student starts the year already knowing 95% of the standards, they make little to no effort to ensure that the student is learning. When talking to parents about this deficiency, I mentioned that the problem is they're looking at the students' position, not their rate-of-change. Were we "doing calculus"? No. But I wouldn't have thought the issue in these terms if I had never taken algebra (where I learned about slope) and calculus (where I learned about derivatives). I would also point out that I pretty much never do long division or long multiplication by hand. I use a calculator, or Siri. But that doesn't meant that students don't need to learn multiplication tables, and the process for doing multi-digit multiplication and division.
- dr_kiszonka 3y agoIsn't addition algebra? Surely, you have added or multiplied in the last five years.
- dventimi 3y agoNo, that's arithmetic.
- Acrobatic_Road 3y agoI used it while going through SICP.
- dventimi 3y agoEver use it for a job?
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- dventimi 3y agoI should've asked who doesn't use algebra.
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