11–20 of 142 posts
"This student had lost four credits’ worth of tuition money, in return for nothing but a lower GPA" Haha, that's what it means when you fail these days. " lost " Wow
Wait until someone points out to the author that statistics heavily relies on calculus...
I vaguely remember the treatment of statistics in my high school/college science classes where calculus wasn't used. It was confusing and tedious. They have you memorize quantiles of the normal distribution so you can answer questions referring to the central limit theorem without ever understanding it, because it is not really possible to understand it without understanding integration. Combined with the fact of the…
How many jobs in science involve pushing around algebraic expressions?
But regardless, while I disagree with the article’s argument it’s valid to debate this topic. My undergrad background is in engineering so I’m very biased here (and work as an engineer and have never used calculus for work). I do think a math major should take biology as much as a biology major should take math (calculus)! Folks often talk about the goal of a liberal arts education being learning a “breadth of topics” or the “classical teachings” and that’s fair and important. But I also think the same for individuals studying a STEM field. Maybe bio majors don’t need the level of calculus rigor required for a physics major but I personally think it’s such a fundamental topic they should learn it.
Wait until someone points out to the author that statistics heavily relies on calculus...
This is a weird argument to make. Does someone need to understand the workings of an internal combustion engine to drive a car?
I vaguely remember the treatment of statistics in my high school/college science classes where calculus wasn't used. It was confusing and tedious. They have you memorize quantiles of the normal distribution so you can answer questions referring to the central limit theorem without ever understanding it, because it is not really possible to understand it without understanding integration. Combined with the fact of the…
Yes, you need to know about integration to understand the central limit theorem, or to do any statistics with continuous values. But most of the time spent in calculus class is not learning what limits, derivatives, and integrals are. It's mostly learning how to take a function defined as some algebraic expression and finding the limit, derivative, or integral as an algebraic expression. How many jobs in science invo…
Most engineering stuff. SW is an exception because SW testing is more about: if the input value can be any int value but customer requires that the function , when given 5 as input returns 3 as output then the function is tested only with 3 as input.
The author claimed that calculus is required to biology major in many colleges. I would argue the opposite, I thought at two different universities and talked to many people. They always find it strange that it is not required for most biology fields. There is even an American invention called algebra based physics. This for people in biology who never saw calculus and your try to teach them physics and mechanics without calculus (Good luck with that, that is at best lost opportunity to understand physics) I thought in algebra bases physics classes many times and it was always horrible experience for both sides. Also calculus is not mandatory in US pre-college.
In general, you don't understand physics without calculus, period.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a weird argument to make. Does someone need to understand the workings of an internal combustion engine to drive a car?
You analogy doesn't hold. You don't need to understand most things (if any) to drive a car. But applying doing. statistical calculation, interpretation and everything else needs to he done with understanding. To understand why you take this distribution function over the other, you will need to understand them which means you need to understand motr fundamental concepts. surprisingly, they depend on your calculus und…
The point is that you have to pick a cut-off somewhere as your foundation to build upon. I doubt much understanding of calculus is required for the vast majority of statistical inference, but I'm certainly no expert.