The hidden assumption behind the "you don't need math" camp in the discussion here is that math is somehow very difficult to learn. Nope. The ideas from high sc

The hidden assumption behind the "you don't need math" camp in the discussion here is that math is somehow very difficult to learn. Nope. The ideas from high school math have been around for thousands of years. How hard could they be to learn? And calculus, calculus is just calculations on functions. Not very profound, but not very difficult either. Interestingly, I find the procedures of calculus to be very similar to iterative programming procedures. A limit is kind of like a while loop, a sequence is an iterator, etc... For example lim_{n->∞} n <==> while(true){ n++; } Perhaps the best "pitch" for acquiring math knowledge is the power you'll gain for modelling the real world. In that respect physics is useful too, since it also deals with models for the real world (kinematics model, momentum model, energy model, etc.)