Non Sequitur by Wiley Miller for September 07, 2021

First, you have to differentiate a woolly mammoth from a mastodon.

My dentist calls that hard stuff on my teeth “calculus”. Honest. Because it’s hard, I guess?

If I can’t do it on my calculator it’s not calculus

Oh dear, the lad’s already caved in…

The sum of all the zebras between here and the big mountain divided by the sum of all lions between here and the big mountain yields …

(punch line from an old joke)

“The squaw on the hippopotamus is equal to the sons of the squaws on the other two hides.”

Even back then, learning calculus was a mammoth task.

Is Calculus still the MOST USELESS THING that schools are still trying to teach nowadays???

Calcu LESS.

Calculus hieroglyphs are hard enough to fathom, without that lot on the cave wall.

What do you use Calculus for anyway?

The owner of the company is getting old and decides he needs help. He thinks how he will decide who is the best candidate to hire. He tinks the best test is a calculus problem

The first candidate in is a mathematician. The old man asks him " What is 1 plus 1 ". The mathematician takes a piece of paper and a pencil and works furiously for an hour then replies " The answer is definitely 2 "

The second candidate in is an engineer. The old man asks him " What is 1 plus 1 " The engineer thinks for a few minutes then replies " The answer is 2 within a specified safety factor "

The third candidate in is an accountant. The old man asks him " What is 1 plus 1 ". Tha accountant goes to the door and looks either way down the hall and closes the door. He goes to the window, looks out and closes the drapes. Then he sits down, leans over and whispers " What would you like it to be "

That’s my view of calculus

I faded at Alg II so never got to calculus. Enjoyed Plane Geom as something I could kinda see as I did it. Managed to find uses for it over the years. Yeah, I know. Simple. But that ain’t bad.

Teacher to parent “Your son is failing calculus.” Parent to teacher “That’s impossible, we speak it at home!”

Calculus: Algebra on steroids.

But what is on the wall is ALGEBRA, no wonder he is failing calculus, he is in the wrong class cave.

He apparently is not able to integrate all of this the first week.

I wonder if he’ll eventually be able to differentiate between the various uses of calculus.

…equals this week’s lunch menu.

Looks more like Hunting 101, the proper way to hunt a mastodon so you don’t end up as the squishy stuff between its toes. If he thinks he’s in Calculus he’s going for a Darwin award.

I wish I had learned much, much earlier that if people treated mathematics as merely a different language or way of looking at things, instead of this imaginary massively thick and incredibly tall brick wall, that it’s not so hard most of the time.

Discovering something new is easier and better than putting up a big front and fearing it all the time instead.

I decided to go back to school and took a night class in calculus. The teacher had to spend 80% of the course teaching math!! Most of the people in class were remedial. I’m bad at math, but not that bad. I guess if you pay the money for the course they don’t care about prerequisites. I understand much of regular college is remedial too.

History if you wear a MAGA hat.

This sounds like my first week in calculus. The teacher (Martha McCormick) was one one the best in the state. Her first week was spent reviewing trig. The test at the end of the week told her if you were ready for calculus. If not the college allowed you to switch to the college trig course at no charge.

Only deaf teachers are assigned to Calc classes, that way they don’t hear the snoring.

It’s all Greek to me.

The sum of the square of the hides is equal to the square of the hippopotamus.

The argument has well been made that Newton’s Principia, wherein calculus was first postulated, is THE most important book to the successful functioning of and our comfortable daily lives in the modern world. Far more important than the Bible in that respect.

I was lost, too. Even with Mom being a PhD in math sciences.

OMG!! ..aaargh! I immediately tried to figure the square root of mammoth over cow squared. …I came up with chicken.

I still cant speak algerba

true story: freshman year of college, math professor, who was high school classmate’s father, fell asleep lecturing us from desk

Since the equation is still unfinished, I am unable to comment on its validity. However, I am able to postulate the meanings of several terms:

Man cubed over torch + spear => Many wish to be hunters but not all are capable of handling weapons

Man carrying spear and torch => Properly armed hunter

Mammoth (Mastodons are longer and lower) over Aurochs => giant species are less common than large species

Square root sign => Not all hunts will be successful

I’ve never used calculus, but I loved learning it, as I have loved all the math I ever learned. And I am certainly no math whiz. Math is the best game ever invented. I love the concepts. As I understand it, and I don’t claim to understand much, calculus is about irregular shapes and about change, which are beyond algebra and Euclidean geometry. I go back from time to time to review the math I did, just for fun, and I’m always amazed by the insights of the great mathematicians.

I remember trying to get my head around integral calculus. I don’t think I ever mastered it and except for some land surveying projects, I had no reason to use it. Fortunately, I started using a Timex Sinclair computer that used the trapezoid rule to break up the area into 128 rectangles. That was much easier.

I, mercifully, avoided taking calculus and trigonometry in high school. It was bad enough scrapping by in chemistry. Of course, when I was in high school, the calculators were wooden slide rules, and your fingers & toes.

How appropriate to be teaching calculus. It is the stone age, after all.

I remember 2 types of calculus, differential (rate of change) and integral (area beneath a curve). Never used it in my type of engineering, but my friend at Lockheed Martin did.

What is calculus? I never took it…

I loved higher math classes. I learned how to think in some different and sometimes eye opening ways. Thank you to some awesome teachers at Janesville Parker Senior High School!

Clearly this represents an early attempt to divide and control public opinion!

My dentist uses calculus when cleans my teeth. Actually, I get so much stuff on my teeth, they are coated with partial differential equations.

My love for math began early. In my avatar (3 y/o) I’m helping Dad study for his PE. In the original photo you can tell I’m working on Integrals. Yes, using a slide rule.

spoken like a true ignoramus that you are

That’s not calculus, it’s just algebra.

For those who don’t know, calculus (and the related differential equations) are used for designing almost every complex system we know. These include cars, bridges, electronics, electrical grids, fluid controls systems, roads, buildings, thermodynamic systems, and of course our knowledge of the universe. As previously mentioned, if physics is involved (and pretty much everything is physics) then you need calculus to understand and describe it. And that does mean that those who understand calculus are doing a huge service for everyone else. Thanks!

That me in algebra!

In college math classes I learned that the most important thing you could say was “the proof is trivial” — but you had to say it with confidence and flair.

me too!

I already knew I wasn’t going to be premed, so my senior year of high school, I dropped calculus after 2 weeks and picked up art history.

I absolutely loved the engineering physics class I took early in my college years. But to get there I had to understand calculus first. Physics only makes sense if you have the math to understand it and physics is reality. To understand reality is always a good thing, as opposed to putting your faith is mythologies and lies.

And, as it turned out, calculus was damn handy for the work I was doing at the time… maintaining analog and digital flight simulators for the Air Force. I don’t use it as much these days, but life makes a lot more sense having learned it in the first place.

It may be true that not everyone “needs” calculus, but in the real world it’s at the heart of most everything we use. So really, we all need calculus, whether we care to admit it or not.

And ladies & gentlemen, and they and however else anyone prefers to be referenced, two big questions -

Did you vote in the last school board election? And what made you vote for the person(s) you chose?

By the second week I had changed classes.

The trick in advanced calculus is setting up the problem and determine the satisfactory calculus solution. Often it involves only one or two steps of actual calculus . But then there can me a messy jungle of algebra and trigonometry afterwards.

I remember my first week of calculus in college, and I was totally lost!