I’m curious as to how calculus is used in those fields. I got a degree in CS and we had to take a bunch of calculus classes but never used it in any of our CS classes and in my 20+ years of programming jobs I’ve never had to use it. Any time in my professional career that I needed math I didn’t know I learned just enough of it to solve my problem and promptly forgot it. I absolutely could not tell you how to mechanically do stuff to derivatives and integrals.

This question is relevant to me because we are deciding what to teach our kids and I haven’t yet been able to come up with a good argument for why to spend time gaining the skill of pen and paper mechanical calculus algorithms.

Are there professional scientists or engineers out there that do calculus on paper?