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To: meyer
A couple of students in my business statistics class got a little upset with me for doing the same thing. I was the ONLY student in that class that had taken any calculus. I set up a couple of group-study meetings with a few other students to try to bring them up to speed. Many had simply not been exposed to any math since basic algebra in high school some 20 years earlier.

Ugh, I don't think you should be able to have a bachelor's degree in anything without calculus.

If you aren't learning calculus, you're basically paying tuition to belong to a book club.

55 posted on 04/16/2010 8:53:13 AM PDT by AmishDude (Mathematician! :))
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To: AmishDude
If you aren't learning calculus, you're basically paying tuition to belong to a book club.

Depends heavily on the teacher.

I loved calculus at the junior college I attended. I had two extremely talented professors who made the subject both fun and interesting. The text was excellent. While rigorous, it was extremely well presented. I got As & Bs.

Then I got to the big 4 year school. My differential equations class was taught by indifferent grad students. The text was utter crap. We spent nearly an entire quarter on first order equations with a week or two devoted to second order. (This is functionally useless to engineers.)

I took and dropped the course twice. The third time, I gutted it out and passed - with a C.

Engineers need an understanding of differential equations because they are the mathematics that describe dynamic systems. What happens to a bridge subjected to dynamic loads, or how an electrical circuit will react to certain inputs, etc., is described by differential equations. My crappy diff-eq class handicapped my visceral understanding of dynamic systems.

I actually LEARNED differential equations in a senior level automatic control systems class. In a week I learned a thousand times what was taught in diff-eq. Enough to enable me, a gear head, to design and build a fourth order active filter network used in my high dollar stereo system to eliminate the effects of record warp.

The teacher and presentation makes all the difference.

57 posted on 04/16/2010 9:15:58 AM PDT by jimt
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To: AmishDude
Ugh, I don't think you should be able to have a bachelor's degree in anything without calculus.

And I don't think you should be able to graduate high school without fluency in least one foreign language, and at least two years of Latin or Greek on top of that.

74 posted on 04/16/2010 10:59:18 AM PDT by Terabitten ("Don't retreat. RELOAD!!" -Sarah Palin)
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