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Education: UK
Gordon Couger writes
Computers do away with the need for some calculus. You can just work it out the long way. Sure, and that's true of many real life problems. However if you don't understand the concept of calculus then you are doing it by rote. Further it's easy to simplify and find an analytic solution that should be close to the answer to check that your result looks plausible. 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. Indeed. The very same method that, taken to the limit, is used to prove integration. Hmm, I can't quite see why recursion is needed if I understand the problem as stated. I doubt she understood recursion but she did get the point about simplifying the problem. Quite. Mindless following by rote using tools you don't understand often results in someone getting cut. 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. It's more than that, often. Frequently simple calculus is used to generate the basic cell, which is then used numerically for the real (and thus often tedious, analytically) life problem. -- Oz This post is worth absolutely nothing and is probably fallacious. Note: soon (maybe already) only posts via despammed.com will be accepted. |
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