[DoodleBob]

Alan Garfinkel, professor of integrative biology and physiology and medicine at UCLA.

Wow...I didn't know he changed careers.

[NorthMountain]

Many schools — particularly those serving large numbers of Black, Hispanic or low-income students — don’t offer the course. And even when they do, it’s of dubious value, they say.

Not everyone is capable of understanding calculus. Trying to teach calculus to people who lack the wit to understand it is a waste of everybody's time.

The ability to understand calculus is probably (perhaps certainly) a good predictor of success when studying science, engineering, or mathematics.

[Tired of Taxes]

Calculus is necessary for some majors, and it should not be dropped.

With that said, the requirement of calculus for a few majors might be questionable. For example, I read that calculus was added to reduce the number of CSC majors because colleges didn’t have enough professors to teach it. Today, CSC still requires calculus, but many colleges have added another computer-related major that focuses more on coding and requires statistics and logic courses, but not calculus.

P.S. The Left tries to make everything into a racial issue. Many homeschoolers of all backgrounds do well in calculus.

[Deplorable American1776]

Calculus, I guess, is another racist subject.. I guess if you want to build a bridge and if it falls apart because you couldn’t calculate the weight properly, it is because of white supremacists and mathematics racism...🤓

[VanShuyten]

“ The view … that math is a bunch of symbolic expressions, and you bang on them with tricks to get other symbolic expressions, is a bankrupt concept of math, dating from the 19th century.””

He obviously went to an inferior high school. My calculus teacher went out of his way to show us how calculus was directly applicable to real-world problems.

[Gay State Conservative]

Wasn’t calculus developed to calculate the orbits of planets?

[Billthedrill]

There is a certain irony in a Professor of a derivative field such as Integrative Biology not demanding calculus from the undergrads. (Bad math joke, sorry.) I hope he was restricting his argument to high school matriculants, as I suspect he was, since one couldn’t succeed in his own field without understanding, say, the importance of areas under a curve and their value within statistics. What he’s saying if I understand it correctly is that high school teaching of calculus is no more useful as a mental discipline than teaching of Latin or Greek used to be. The problem is that it isn’t any less, either. IMHO.

[Iron Munro]

Here is the man who saw this coming.....

[fruser1]

lim_x→a f(x) = L iff ∀ ε > 0 ∃ δ > 0 s.t. 0 < |x - a| < δ ⇒ |f(x) - L| < ε

[<1/1,000,000th%]

Can’t do advanced physics without calculus.

[joe fonebone]

See.....
Math is racist...

[ViLaLuz]

[dfwgator]

Meanwhile the Chinese are going, “Do it!”

[stremba]

Honestly, calculus in high school is probably overkill for most students. A good mathematical foundation for college prep classes with rigorous courses in geometry, algebra, and trigonometry would probably suffice for most. Some study of probability and statistics would likely be more beneficial for most students than a calculus course. For those students interested in majoring in engineering, science, mathematics, or other disciplines requiring calculus, having an elective calculus course is fine.

There’s nothing magical about calculus that makes you automatically smart when you take it. It’s just a very useful branch of mathematics for many fields of study, but one that is not necessarily essential for the average citizen. It actually is not even really much more difficult to master than any other branch of math. The real issue is that it is most often taught with an eye to mathematical rigor rather than in a way that allows a more intuitive understanding. Anyone who has ever read a calculus text knows what I mean.

A good example is the basic concept of a limit. This is a concept that is readily understood intuitively. It is also a concept that is very confusing when expressed in mathematically rigorous fashion. Basically a limit is just a value a formula “gets clos to” when the input “gets close to” a specified value. It’s that “gets close to” part that’s tough to define rigorously. An example would help: consider the formula y= (x^2-1)/(x-1). For any value of x, we can calculate y using this formula, any value that is except for x=1. That value gives zero divided by zero, which we all learned is undefined. However we can look at values of x very close to 1 and see what happens. For x=0.99, we get y=1.99. For x=0.999 we get y=1.999, for x=1.0001 we get y=2.0001, and so on. Intuitively we see that as x gets close to 1, y gets close to 2, and indeed the limit as x approaches 1 for this function is indeed 2.

Basically at its heart, all calculus is is the study of limits. The derivative is just the limit of the slope formula (change in y)/(change in x) as we allow the change in x to approach zero. Integration is a limit process where we divide an area into rectangular regions whose area we know and add those areas. We find that we get a better approximation to the area by using narrower rectangles, so we take the limit as the width approaches zero. Infinite sums are just limits of finite sums as we allow the number of terms to increase. Basically once you grasp the idea of limits, calculus really is not that much harder than algebra or trigonometry.

[Mr Rogers]

When I took it in high school in the 70s, there were less than 20 students in the class. The graduating class was 660.

If 20% are now taking it, it has been dumbed down.

But it is still a valid part of math.

[Some Fat Guy in L.A.]

I had a professor that said “Higher mathematics is what separates the engineer from the guy that greases the bearings”. I was more comfortable with the grease can, but I learned enough to pass.

[jonrick46]

If you have the discipline to follow the rules of calculus it is an easy system to master.

[DoughtyOne]

I D I O C R A C Y

more than it was
cracked up to be

[Faith Presses On]

I took it in high school, but dropped it midway. Retrospectively, I’ve come to think that math at the secondary school level isn’t taught particularly well, or at least didn’t use to be. And I grew up in an upper middle class suburb. In less affluent places, it’s no wonder that most kids don’t do all that well with it. I remember a great many of the very smart kids in my algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus classes also struggled to follow and learn the material.

Nevertheless, I’ve had a strong interest in math, reading about it quite a bit over the years, and recently read one of the “Dummies” books on calculus. It was very well-written, and I feel like I learned a lot from it. If I’d had that book back in high school, I think I would have completed the class with a good grade.

[RinaseaofDs]

Garfinkel is an idiot, of course.

Can’t calculate infusion rates without understanding the partial pressures first. That’s differential equations, and highly dependent on Calculus. You can either understand how that’s done and then build trust in the tools, or think it is magic and trust the black box.