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Comment by CalChris | Hacker News Reader

Berkeley EECS grad. I didn't go the device physics route but I used calculus about twice in 4 years except in physics classes.

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Circuit analysis turns differential equations into algebra, so you might have been using calculus more than you realize.

Yeah, I might have been guilty of some hyperbole. I remember a nasty integral on the Linear Systems midterm. It probably would have taken an hour or so if I didn't make any mistakes; but you could transform it and solve it as a linear equation in 10 seconds.

That was the point of the class, that there area two kinds of problems, linear problems and problems you can't solve.

I'm not in the least suggesting that an engineer shouldn't go through three semesters of Calculus, Linear Algebra+DiffEq and a Discrete Math course.

That really makes no sense, unless the "EE" part was optional in your case.

There are different "tracks", and some of them have very little EE (with way more CS focus). I think I only took two EE courses IIRC..

The beauty of calculus is that you actually understand the Real World.

For example I taught my daughter factions this way.

Me: "These factions you see them? Now see these decimal points?"

Her: "Yeah I hate factions they are stupid!"

Me: "Factions are the only consistently real numbers below 1 and decimal points for the most part are made up numbers. 1/3 is 1/3 and never .3333."

Her: "I always thought it was the otehr way around."

... Ohhhhhh.

I wish you would teach me calculus =)

This... might have come out wrong. What I meant was something along the lines of: You should teach, have you considered mentoring?

The first sentence in Your last statement in your conversation to your daughter is profoundly wrong. Your daughter was not in any way made to better understand fractions by this interaction. By the way, .3333 is a rational number and therefore equal to a fraction.

is there a reason you call them factions and not fractions?

Your idea did not translate into English. I think you are trying to say that most decimals we see in real life are approximations, not exact measurements, while fractions are exact?

This has nothing to do with calculus, though.

https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/decimals.html

You can construct a complete ordered field from infinite decimals

Berkeley lets you skip learning asymptotic runtime analysis of algorithms if you're doing EECS? Weird.

FYI: infinite sums are calculus.

Berkeley's a really good university.

lel

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