I disagree. Very few of the people who work in computer related fields really need calculus. If there were one essential course I would vote, strongly, for linear algebra. I doubt, seriously, that 98% (or more) of people doing computer programming need to use anything from Calculus. They certainly need to understand the idea of a function, but really only on a discrete set. Maybe they need a qualitative understand of continuity, and really know what exponential means (as opposed to its use in the press -- where it just means "a lot"). One of the big failings in Calculus courses is that they don't do enough to build up their student's intuition about the qualitative behavior of functions. And as far as linear algebra, I was shocked (many years ago) when one of my colleagues at IBM, who had a B.S. in math from NYU and a Ph.D. from Berkeley in CS (and is today on the National Academy of Engineering, an IEEE Fellow, etc. etc.) had really deficient knowledge in linear algebra. Knowing it better would have helped him a lot. Victor On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 1:03 PM, Warren Smith <warren.wds@gmail.com> wrote:
For what it is worth, I think it would be absolutely absurd to allow getting a CS college degree without knowing calculus.
I also have a hard time accepting the idea that general people do not need to know and should not be taught algebra. But the best argument for that stance might be (which is not mentioned at all in the newspaper of course) the advent of software like mathematica. I think that technology like that PERHAPS could be used to completely change traditional math education and both speed it up and make it better. Optimally, you'd learn the principles and ideas while skipping the drudgery and errors. I'm not sure if that goal is feasible, but I am fairly sure that the educators and software writers haven't yet put in a high quality attempt to accomplish it. There have been low-quality attempts which I never saw convincing evidence worked better than 1950s style teaching and may work worse. One thing I'd like to see in education is controlled experiments, like educate class #K with method #K. This would be easy to do in large universities. But I've never seen any ever do it.
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