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 <[email protected]> *** 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 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
