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Comment by taeric | Hacker News Reader

I'll bite. Why is calculus a goal?

Because, without it you will be at a great disadvantage in entering any STEM undergraduate program in the US.

I'll agree that any stem targeted students should get exposure. Not clear that it helps most students.

Maybe for most of them, however i found calculus totally useless for my CS degree (the only time i recall it mentioned was defining big-oh notation). Otoh i liked calculus so still time well spent.

Of course, that's not counting "mathamatical maturity" which is super important or if you're doing some specific thing that needs calculus (hello machine learning.)

It's pretty simple:

- calculus if you want to do engineering

- discrete mathematics if you want to do CS

You can teach these in university, it's not a problem. Calculus doesn't need to be taught in high school to everyone but it should be available and it should be the goal state in terms of curriculum pace for everyone so that you should have no problem taking it by the time you are 17 or 18 (which is what we're talking about).

Anything else propagates back to a regressive dumbing down in an earlier year, from an already dumbed down curriculum by international standards.

> - calculus if you want to do engineering

> - discrete mathematics if you want to do CS

I'd guess the vast majority of software development jobs are like "gluing one API layer to another" and "writing simple-to-complex CRUD apps". Neither calculus or discrete mathematics really helps if your goal is to simply make a computer read data from database X and display it in webform Y.

I found all of the math required by my undergrad degree to be totally useless in real life programming. Whether you need any math at all will highly depend on the application domain you get in to. The most complex math I needed as a code monkey was vector arithmetic (3D graphics) and trigonometry (ocean and aero mapping navigation).

The majority of MDs are reading charts or diagnosing the flu or allergies or stitching up a wound, why should they understand biochemistry?

This begs the question that they do. Probably safe to assume that most don't.

Just like it is safe to assume that most programmers aren't good at calculus. Or discrete math. Or proofs.

There is a move to get basic care into the hands of nurse practitioners and probably similarly most programmers shouldn't bother studying anything. If there is enough consumer demand to fill experience-based jobs then that's the market reality but it doesn't mean doctors who are meant to invent new cures don't need biochemistry or engineers who are meant to design new solutions don't need mathematics.

Most programmers will never design new solutions and are objectively terrible at their job.

> Most programmers will never design new solutions and are objectively terrible at their job.

I don’t think you know anything about professional programming if you think that makes them “objectively terrible at their job”. Sometimes businesses just need a website.

Exactly, why should they? Seems like a meaningless bar created for no practical reason, just like 90% of the other stuff everyone learns in school.

We're talking about doing CS as a degree in college, not coding in a job. You don't even need to study CS to get a coding job.

As an aside, those secretarial coding jobs will all go away within 50 years. They are only needed in the transition period where machines still depend on humans to talk to each other.

At that point education won't matter period.

If you're studying turing machines would calculus really be useful in your day to day?

I found it incredibly useful for learning all sorts of probability theory despite hating calculus. And I really think to be a well rounded CS graduate you need some background in stats/ML nowadays. So many of our systems have some element of ML-based recommendation and it's important that a new grad can meaningfully engage with those systems in research and in industry.

I don't disagree, but it's an unfortunately circular argument. "Calculus is the peak of HS math because college STEM programs expect you to have calculus because it's the peak of HS math." I think probability and statistics is almost certainly more useful in the real world, but it will never become the baseline while everyone is fixated on calculus.

It's not a goal. It's a ceiling.

Many high schools offer mathematics through Calculus. You can typically get to that course at the regular high school pace if you were able to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade. If you were ahead of that pace, then you are typically left with few options outside of taking college courses.

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