It is shocking to me that people would seriously discuss not teaching calculus just because LLM tools exist. Computational math engines didn't make understanding how you solve an integral obsolete, but they can make certain tasks faster and less error-prone.
This feels like a "tech bro" idea from someone who has never touched a SEM field (STEM minus the T).
Why learn anything? I for one want my brain to be completely empty, devoid of any thought or knowledge. Then I can simply pay OpenAI to think for me.
Honestly, the trend toward anti-intellectualism in the world is very disturbing to me, and it seems AI is enabling this kind of contempt for knowledge even more.
I genuinely wonder what even is worth learning in the age of AI. It just feels like learning stuff doesn't really matter anymore. Unless you're an expert in some field, a novice with access to an LLM will usually produce better results than you.
Article has been hugged so commenting more along the comments here.
Pharmacy school teaches Calculus. Why would that be? Do you need to run derivatives and integrals to fill prescriptions?
No. Teaching maths, particularly calculus, teaches people how to 1) not make mistakes and 2) catch your own mistakes quickly. Vitally important skills for someone filling out live-saving medicine.
I was lucky to have a high school math teacher who derived calculus with us. Understanding calculus made understanding physics so much easier. Being able to solve some physics problems using calculus seemed like magic.
Of course, I've never had to use any of that knowledge since, but I'm glad I went through the process to acquire it.
I mean I think the bigger issue is that, at least for me, unless I am regularly using a skill I learn I forget most if not all of it.
I trig, and calc 1 yet I hardly remember how to solve most problems because its not something I use regularly.
Same with subnetting or remembering certain programming languages.
I literally don't use these things 99% of the time and so I forget them. Sure I understand some of the basics and I could probably pick it back up way faster than someone who knows nothing but I am human.
I wouldn't recommend a traditional calculus course to anyone. There's no reason to do derivatives or integrals by hand, and that's most of the course.
The practical applications of running differences and running sums can be taught to people with minimal programming experience and without algebra.
I've never done an integral by hand as part of any productive activity. Monte carlo integration and loops for multiply-and-add have proven incredibly useful. Why not teach those directly?
The question makes as much sense to me as "why teach literature in the age of typewriters?" Not that the analogies are perfect, but the idea that it's not worth learning something because a related technology has advanced significantly is a non sequitur.
There may be good reasons to learn or not to learn calculus, or literary theory, or anything else, but the existence of some related technology isn't it. I'd go so far as to suggest that perhaps calculus is even more important for some folks to learn in the age of AI (e.g. applications in neural networks), and we don't know who those folks will be in advance.
One of the few moments in university was learning how so much was actually Calculus.
Whether it was physics, chemistry, etc, the formulas I was given ften had a calculus version.
It helped me open up to taking math and stats courses I never would have as a comp sci student, which in turn gave me a different perspective than just taking cs courses alone.
Mathematica can do calculus and linear algebra better than most if not all college graduates since decades ago, but colleges are still teaching those courses. That should explain enough.
>Don't. Calculus is going to become as obsolete and antiquated as studying Euclid's Elements
Yeah, as antiquated and obsolete that we basically have every high school student do it in the United States. You know, the class we call GEOMETRY. Because you do know, that high school geometry classes are just basically using cleaned up and modernized texts based on Euclid's Elements, right?
Sounds good. More people will study Calculus than ever before. Good plan.
I'd never recommend someone not learn calculus, but the average non-technical high school or college student would probably benefit more from learning statistics instead.
Learning calculus is very valuable to a relatively small number of people. We should absolutely make calculus available to any student, regardless in advances in AI. But a lot more people, particularly non-technical or non-math type people, would benefit more from experience with statistics than calculus. Statistics, combined with an introduction to simple programming, should be part of the basic high-school curriculum.
Math is like language. You can have a translation book and sure it'll work if needed. But being fluent teaches you about an entire new world.
Math teaches you how to think internally in an interesting way like algorithms of thought. Physics teaches you how the world works reading it is one thing. Understanding the language is where the beauty lies
As somebody who aced calculus, what I was effectively doing was just being a human calculator mindlessly applying memorized differentiation and integration rules to get desired result. No real thinking or problem solving, which begs the question of why bother really teaching kids to be machines when machines can do such task. I would imagine the difficulty others had was more due to the way the topic was approached/framed rather than their executive ability to do predetermined tasks.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 30.1 ms ] threadThis feels like a "tech bro" idea from someone who has never touched a SEM field (STEM minus the T).
Honestly, the trend toward anti-intellectualism in the world is very disturbing to me, and it seems AI is enabling this kind of contempt for knowledge even more.
Pharmacy school teaches Calculus. Why would that be? Do you need to run derivatives and integrals to fill prescriptions?
No. Teaching maths, particularly calculus, teaches people how to 1) not make mistakes and 2) catch your own mistakes quickly. Vitally important skills for someone filling out live-saving medicine.
Of course, I've never had to use any of that knowledge since, but I'm glad I went through the process to acquire it.
I trig, and calc 1 yet I hardly remember how to solve most problems because its not something I use regularly.
Same with subnetting or remembering certain programming languages.
I literally don't use these things 99% of the time and so I forget them. Sure I understand some of the basics and I could probably pick it back up way faster than someone who knows nothing but I am human.
I've never done an integral by hand as part of any productive activity. Monte carlo integration and loops for multiply-and-add have proven incredibly useful. Why not teach those directly?
There may be good reasons to learn or not to learn calculus, or literary theory, or anything else, but the existence of some related technology isn't it. I'd go so far as to suggest that perhaps calculus is even more important for some folks to learn in the age of AI (e.g. applications in neural networks), and we don't know who those folks will be in advance.
One of the few moments in university was learning how so much was actually Calculus.
Whether it was physics, chemistry, etc, the formulas I was given ften had a calculus version.
It helped me open up to taking math and stats courses I never would have as a comp sci student, which in turn gave me a different perspective than just taking cs courses alone.
Mathematica can do calculus and linear algebra better than most if not all college graduates since decades ago, but colleges are still teaching those courses. That should explain enough.
Yeah, as antiquated and obsolete that we basically have every high school student do it in the United States. You know, the class we call GEOMETRY. Because you do know, that high school geometry classes are just basically using cleaned up and modernized texts based on Euclid's Elements, right?
Sounds good. More people will study Calculus than ever before. Good plan.
Learning calculus is very valuable to a relatively small number of people. We should absolutely make calculus available to any student, regardless in advances in AI. But a lot more people, particularly non-technical or non-math type people, would benefit more from experience with statistics than calculus. Statistics, combined with an introduction to simple programming, should be part of the basic high-school curriculum.
Math teaches you how to think internally in an interesting way like algorithms of thought. Physics teaches you how the world works reading it is one thing. Understanding the language is where the beauty lies