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Math doesn't come in levels. It only seems linear because it's taught that way. You can teach kids group theory before calculus without a hitch.
by tedsanders 13y ago
Math doesn't come in levels. It only seems linear because it's taught that way. You can teach kids group theory before calculus without a hitch.
- nostrademons 13y agoYeah, I was surprised by the framing of the question. Math is not a set of levels, it's a set of tools that are each useful in certain situations, many of which build upon each other. The branches of math that are most useful in programming are set theory, logic, linear algebra, and statistics, and most of them don't even appear in the U.S. high school math curriculum. I still remember getting to college thinking I was hot shit because I learned calculus as a freshman in high school, and then realizing I had no clue how to construct a proof. Calculus is taught in schools because it's how you send rockets into space, and in many STEM professions it's a dead-end that isn't all that useful for the job.
- eru 13y agoOptimization is often useful as well. (E.g. lots of standard algorithms like, eg, for find the shortest path in a graph, can be expressed as linear optimization problems.)
- the_cat_kittles 13y agoThat is a little bit of a stretch- I think it generally makes more sense to people to move from discrete to abstract. But I agree that it's much less linear than how its currently taught.