"Oz" wrote in message
...
James Curts writes

I also am of the 60's era and without calculus pursued a very rewarding
engineering career.

In what area, and which degree did you take?

Today I see students quite intent on the study of
calculus. Most seem to be first and second year university students
working
toward mechanical and electrical/electronics fields.

To what end are they working? Do you mean calculus is not necessary or
that
it has been surpassed by another form of mathematics?

Eh?

You have quite missed my point.

Elementary calculus is necessary and hasn't been conveniently surpassed
by another form of mathematics. It is, after all, 300 year old
mathematics. It's not rocket science.

Because elementary calculus is no longer a requirement for A level
science, those areas that need it have been removed and replaced by
descriptive rote learning modules (largely devoid of understanding).

I'm not at all surprised that first year university science students
would have to start learning calculus, but on the whole it would have
been much better had they started learning it at school.

At the elementary level it's not after all very difficult.

Computers do away with the need for some calculus. You can just work it out
the long way. One engineer was trying to find the volume of a stream
profiles at different levels with a computer program. That is a classic area
under a curve problem and she couldn't covert it to code. Since the data was
on a X, Y data it was all straight lines. Each section of the stream could
just be solve using the area of a triangle added to the are of he rectangle
above it. When summed up in a recursive function it took about a half page
of code and a hour to show her how to do it.

I doubt she understood recursion but she did get the point about simplifying
the problem.

For an engineer anything difficult enough to require calculus has a look up
table anyway

In 8 years of solving problems for engineers I never used calculus once.
Maybe they could solve the ones that needed calculus and just brought me the
hard ones.

Gordon