Teaching Myself Calculus at Sixty-Five | Hacker News Reader

Teaching Myself Calculus at Sixty-Five

newyorker.com

58 pointsBrajeshwar16 comments

Sounds like calculus is going to become an integral part of the author's life. Hope they make continuous small changes that will push them to their mathematical limits.

This joke is kind of derivative.

There will probably be a series of comments like this. There must be a limit but it could be infinite.

You're assuming the comments will converge. But what if we cannot find a vicinity where all the bits can be located in?

At this point we may be tangent to the comment’s original arc.

Epsilon.

We can state with certainty that the number of comments is monotonically increasing.

the fact that the numbers of terms (errrm... comments) in a series is growing is no guarantee that the it will converge

This is about a 26-year old, not a 65-year old, but it's also of interest: https://nautil.us/how-i-rewired-my-brain-to-become-fluent-in... Also, HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8402859

To any one learning calculus if you're getting bogged down in all that " the limit as delta X goes to zero ..." stuff just forget about it. Instead, look up "non standard analysis" on wikipedia, use the dx and dy things as tiny tiny numbers and things will be much easier (and still correct).

I'm in my late 30s, I recently started learning math again. I'm going back to the point I dropped out myself. highschool level.

somehow I managed to get a CS degree but I don't really understand how to simplify an algebra equation lol

and don't even get me started on geometry! I don't know who Sine, Cosine and Tangent are, but they haunt my dreams! they're always standing in a circle, it's freaky.

Calculus is beautiful

Someday when the life expectancy is 120 people will look back and wonder why the New Yorker mentioned his age of 65. Was it hard for 65 year olds back then to think logically, so doing it at 65 was some kind of achievement?

Unless we can find a way to stop or reverse aging that will never happen. And if we can it’ll be much longer than 120.

Hopefully the retirement age will increase, too!

That’s the thing though. If medicine improves to stop people from dying by the aging process is not adjusted, life expectancy doesn’t really mean much. You’re still old. Your body is weaker. Your mind is slower. You probably can’t work effectively, you just don’t die.

People like to think low life expectancies from centuries prior implied people were “old” at 40. But of course that’s false. People still age the same. Many still lived into the same typical elderly ages we see today.

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