4 ms·
The band kids and the football kids never ask their teachers and coaches, “when will I ever use this”. Because they are playing the flute and they are playing
by m_for_monkey 14y ago
The band kids and the football kids never ask their teachers and coaches, “when will I ever use this”.
Because they are playing the flute and they are playing football. They enjoy it now and that's what counts, they don't even think about the future.
And yet they come into my math class and raise their hand half-way through my demonstration of the mean value theorem to ask me when they will ever use this.
Because the "mean value theorem" sounds like boring shit and their only hope is that it may be useful in the future.
If you teach them programming to solve their physics homework and make it a game using math, they won't ask.
Never.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago> If you teach them programming to solve their physics homework and make it a game using math, they won't ask. True. That's actually how I ended up as a programmer - math in school was boring, trying to make a video game was not. I finally learned trigonometry only when I was trying to figure out how to rotate an object in 2D space for my game. Also, there was a point in time when I used a "formula for distance/vector length in 2D space", but I had absolutely no idea what that "Pythagoras' theorem" is useful for.
- cellis 14y agoGame programming will more quickly take you down the math rabbit hole than than any other kind of programming. It is always painfully clear that you should know better math when you run into a simple problem like "find a solution to hit this moving target", or something more complex like "figure out how the inverse kinematics of animal's bones work". For the first problem you could use anything from tight to algebra to calculus to solve it. For the second, you might easily find yourself knee deep in a PDF giving you a "remedial treatment of jacobian matrices"