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Comment by cageface | Hacker News Reader

I really can't agree with this strongly enough. I had enough Calculus and Differential Equations courses to kill a horse in college (Chemistry major) and I've never used that knowledge once in my entire programming career. But I find uses for linear algebra and matrices in coding all the time. Thank god Strang's excellent course is available online for free.

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If you were looking to become a programmer, maybe you shouldn't have majored in chemstry, where strong Calculus foundations make perfect sense :)

Chemist here, who also programs. Inorganic chemists do calculus all the time. Organic chemists do arithmetic (stoichiometry) and some discrete analysis (instrumentation, the computers do the heavy lifting), orgo is primarily a linguistic discipline, i.e. we are expected to parse sentences like "benzophenone in THF was refluxed in the presence of Pd black for 2 hours" and to know, without being told, that there's a workup before the next step in the reaction.

Exactly. I was an organic chemist. Never used a lick of Calculus. I didn't get into programming until I'd already been working as a chemist for about five years.

In order to understand quantum mechanics, the foundation of modern chemistry, properly, don't you need a strong appreciation of calculus?

"I learned more than enough welding when apprenticing as a metalsmith but now as a chef use none of it."

At least at that time the comp sci people I knew had to take about the same number of math classes the chem people did. Maybe that's changed now.

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