Calculus isn’t just a Waste of School

Image result for calculus meme

Image result for calculus meme

Alright, I think the amount of calculus memes I’ve added are good enough.  Too bad none of them are amazing, but eh, you got to work with what you have.

Despite what most high schoolers or undergraduates in college say, calculus is not useless.  Well actually, I don’t think people really say that, but that’s not that important.  Calculus has a lot of real world applications that aren’t just completely random and only specific to one job.  Calculus can be used in architecture, literally any physics related thing, business, anything that changes with time, and being efficient.  Oh and computer programming.

The architecture and efficiency part kind of go hand in hand, because you can use calculus to find the optimal use of resources before it becomes a waste.  You can also use it to find distances, lengths, etc.  Again, business has to do with that efficiency part.  You can see how many units of a product can maximize product, or see how much material is needed to optimize a product, or in regular terms, what’s the cheapest we can get to?

Physics is obviously the main place where calculus is used.  It can be used to find rates, such as speed and acceleration and jerk, or distance, area, volume, etc.

Calculus is big on dealing with rates.  Slopes are pretty important in calculus as a whole, so you can tell how fast a function is growing or decreasing, or maybe not even moving at all.

Computers have to compute equations to do the stuff that they do.  Everything is in terms of math and/or code.  When you request an action, such as type in something to a calculator, that takes time.  Some functions are very complex, like trigonometry functions.  So in order to get past the lengthy time it would normally take to compute those, the computer uses a calculus technique to represent the function as a series in the form of a polynomial.  Usually the series don’t completely represent the function, and have a narrow window, but other series can represent the function for all real numbers, like in the case of e^x.  An approximation is a good option, because they can be pretty accurate, and very fast.

Calculus isn’t just some useless thing you may be required to learn at one point in your life; it actually has some purpose.  I only mentioned some applications of Calculus AB and Calculus BC, but there are way more, and even more in Multivariable Calculus.  So if you’re just starting Calculus, you should thank Newton for what he started.  Adios amigos.

7 thoughts on “Calculus isn’t just a Waste of School”

        1. Yea I remember Mr. Korn saying something like that, and yea, imagine calculating something using an entirely new function

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