Personally I consider education a completely different way to most - to me it's about training the brain to think and not about learning "facts" As far as training the brain to think is concerned logic and mathematics are IMO the most fundamental - and beyond those philosophy. So as far as I'm concerned every effort should be made to take every child's education as far as possible in the fields of logic, math and philosophy in particular. Not to do this, and reducing this will (obviously) lead to a rise in Creationism and new-age superstitious nonsense - this is already happening !! To me the most important change in thought process required is an appreciation of the idea of limits, and algebra and calculus are great for verifying the idea of limits - specifically of course the basic analytical proof of differentiation. On 31 Jul 2012, at 00:52, Mike Stay wrote:
On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 4:41 PM, Victor Miller <victorsmiller@gmail.com> wrote:
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.
That's a pretty good one; I'd say statistics and graph theory are pretty fundamental to the practice, too. -- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
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