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[Discuss] OT: Do CS grads need calculus?
- Subject: [Discuss] OT: Do CS grads need calculus?
- From: rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert Krawitz)
- Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2015 11:42:57 -0400
- In-reply-to: <55290F33.2010906@blu.org> (gaf@blu.org)
- References: <Pine.NEB.4.64.1504071109270.27385@panix3.panix.com> <BY1PR0401MB16416312ED2374F8E2AB827FDCFD0@BY1PR0401MB1641.namprd04.prod.outlook.com> <55290F33.2010906@blu.org>
I've never used calculus professionally. I've wound up in mostly low level systems work, but 30+ years ago I wouldn't have known what I was going to do. My opinion is that calculus is an important branch of mathematics, and it's important for what I might call a liberal scientific education. There are more situations than one might think in real life where understanding the fundamentals of calculus -- the derivative and the integral -- is helpful. One very obvious example is the deficit and the debt -- the debt is the integral from time0 to now of the deficit; the deficit is the first derivative of the debt. Actually, there's one software case in which I've used the basic concept of the derivative: in Gutenprint, I've selected algorithms to try to avoid discontinuities in the first and second derivatives of the ink curves. -- Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu> *** MIT Engineers A Proud Tradition http://mitathletics.com *** Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- http://ProgFree.org Project lead for Gutenprint -- http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net "Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works." --Eric Crampton
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