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Jul - General Chat - Dear calculus: New poll - New thread - New reply
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Drag
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Posted on 03-27-09 04:41:32 PM Link | Quote
1051
You can get fucked up the ass, with something hard and spikey.

Love, Drag.

Seriously, can anyone give me a reason why I have to know any of this? What is its practical use in programming and game programming?

Blah, I fail so hard.

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Posted on 03-27-09 04:44:47 PM Link | Quote
Oh god, I know how you feel.

I only took it to fill up an empty class slot, even.

I seriously just got screwed over this quarter by a cold that was draining all my energy.

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Hiryuu

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Posted on 03-27-09 04:53:12 PM Link | Quote
Only class I've ever legitimately failed.

I don't get it either. Not that bright, I guess.

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Drag
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Posted on 03-27-09 04:56:21 PM Link | Quote
1052
I was good at math up until calc happened. Afterwards, everything just went completely downhill. I'm missing 12 credits because I keep needing to retake this course (since it's required), and I'm currently not an upperclassman, even though next semester will begin my senior year. Everything is just not going right, and I really don't want to have to take another year of classes here, but I'm just so screwed either way, I'm beginning to wonder if it'd be better to just drop out of college rather than waste more money into it.

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Hiryuu

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Posted on 03-27-09 04:59:55 PM Link | Quote
Welcome to why I don't have my degree yet. I'm 20 credits off and this is most of the reason.

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Eppy37
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Posted on 03-27-09 05:02:55 PM Link | Quote
I suffered to doom on Precalculus, but that was becaus ethe teacher sucked.

But I'm looking at what I'm learning and I'm having huge doubts I'llneed to know this stuff for life. I feel a lot of this was just made up for lols.

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devin

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Posted on 03-27-09 05:24:11 PM Link | Quote
I'm currently averaging a 38% in MAC2312. I challenge any of you to beat that.

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SquashMonster
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Posted on 03-27-09 05:58:12 PM Link | Quote
Calculus is more useful than the bulk of algebra.

Seriously. Want to know how fast something is changing? Derivative, and you're done. How fast? Derivative of position. Acceleration? Derive that again. And derivatives are easy, if you memorize the rules instead of trying to go through the definition or something crazy.

Want to know the total of something? Integral. Done. And it's good for areas, too. And it's almost easy, to boot. Except the inverse of the chain rule, 'cause that's a pain in the ass.

Of course, all that infinite sum stuff can go fuck a porcupine. What a load of shit. At least you can use L'Hopital's Rule repeatedly on everything (regardless of whether it follows the rules for using L'Hopital's) and get the right answer 80% of the time. 'cause doing that shit the right way sucks.

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Hiryuu

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Posted on 03-27-09 06:02:04 PM Link | Quote
I will say that I'll use basic trig every so often for myself here...and having some computational skills in the gist of algebra DOES help.

Calculus in its entirety, however, does nothing for me on a daily basis.

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SquashMonster
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Posted on 03-27-09 06:06:10 PM Link | Quote
The only trigonometry operations I ever use are cosine, sine, and arctangent.

I have no idea what the thousands trig identities we had to learn in precalculus were supposed to help with.

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S.N.N.
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Posted on 03-27-09 06:06:56 PM Link | Quote
Oh my god, Kattwah's layout works!
--------------------------------

Kind of ironic how I just failed a calc test on optimization and such today. I can totally agree that calculus can take a large blunt object and fuck it, or fuck whatever for that matter.

(also, on the first test of basic derivatives, I kept taking the second derivative when I was only supposed to take the first. Let's just say that my mark was .. less than ideal.)

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Cirvante
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Posted on 03-27-09 07:24:47 PM (last edited by Cirvante at 03-27-09 11:01 PM) Link | Quote
Calculus is actually very useful for computational programming. In fact, many of the assignments in our C++ class are based on calculating series and approximations that would be otherwise hard to work with by hand (Euler, Simpson, 4th-order Runge-Kutta, etc). Also, knowing integrals and derivatives generally make Physics classes much easier.

Of course, that's pretty much as far as its usefulness goes. Optimization, linearization, centroids and solids/volumes of revolution are pretty much worthless outside of the fields of civil or mechanical engineering. Infinite series are almost useless except for knowing the error bounds for approximating their sums (which is actually very helpful and even necessary in most cases). The only series you'd ever have any use for anyway are Taylor and Fourier series, but they're also the most painful-- try integrating or differentiating those and you'll see what I mean.

The only thing that really bothers me about Calculus courses is that you have to do everything by hand. I mean, why bother calculating an approximation for something like ln(x)/2x+1 when you can program a computer to do it in less time than it would take you to even lift your pencil?

Which brings me to my next point-- computational mathematics. Hate to say it, dude, but this is what you'll be doing most of the time in upper-level programming courses. This, my friend, is the actual reason why we CE/CS nerds are required to know Calculus, because we have to know what the fuck we're doing before we translate it into our code, not to mention we have a fallback option to figure out what happened if something went wrong.

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Hiryuu

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Posted on 03-27-09 07:29:15 PM Link | Quote
I think that's one of the main reasons I jumped ship off software and went hardware for my route instead. Don't need the brain damage. Perhaps I was wiser to think that way.

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Posted on 03-27-09 09:57:29 PM Link | Quote
Originally posted by SquashMonster
The only trigonometry operations I ever use are cosine, sine, and arctangent.

I don't have any use for tangents right now, but as for sines and cosines, they're pretty much required if you want to do anything involving circles (or other round objects)

I've actually been considering using a radius-based hitbox system for my SMB1 script as opposed to the current bounding box system, simply because circular grabs seem a lot more natural than rectangular ones (and fit enemy shapes better).

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SquashMonster
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Posted on 03-27-09 10:40:14 PM Link | Quote
Oh, tangents are prettymuch useless. Arctangent is where it's at.

It's how you convert two points into a direction.

-or- heat-seeking missiles.

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Posted on 03-27-09 11:21:44 PM Link | Quote
Calculus makes a difference in graphics programming (surface representation) and algorithm efficiency (the notion of limits). Outside of that, I have no idea. At any level of programming not for something computational, you never see it as far as I know, high or low level. But understanding limits is important, helps you justify why your algorithm or your approach to a problem is efficent. In graphics, you'd be amazed at how simple a teapot can be with just 32 bezier functions. That is why I think we need to learn calculus and why CS is favored over someone with a computer informational technology degree.
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Posted on 03-27-09 11:52:57 PM Link | Quote
IMO, learning higher‐level math is its own reward. Calculus really isn’t that hard—it’s mostly just understanding simple concepts (dy/dx is really just Δy/Δx, ∫f(x)dx is the sum of a bunch of rectangles) and using them to do progressively harder things. My favorite bits of calculus so far have been curve sketching and volumes/etc. of revolution; OTOH, infinite sequences and series are just nasty.
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Posted on 03-28-09 12:11:07 AM Link | Quote

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Metal_Man88
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Trig was much more of a problem for me than Calc. I got an A in my Calculus class.

And I did it in an intersession.

Next intersession, I do the next part of Calc. Then I'll just need to do Linear Algebra...

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BlackNemesis13
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Posted on 03-28-09 01:15:29 AM Link | Quote
For me, how hard it is really depends on who is teaching the course. I aced calculus in high school because I had an awesome teacher. Once I took it in college though, I failed hard. Luckily, at the college I'm attending now, I tested out of all of the required math courses. But yeah, if I wanted to take another math course, I'd definitely need a refresher. I've come across no need for calculus in everyday life, unless I want to better understand some higher level physics lectures that I listen to in my spare time. That, or just to keep my math skills sharp.

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Posted on 03-28-09 01:41:17 AM Link | Quote
Sukasa - Send Private Message

Hate calculus, especially since I haven't used anything I've learned since about Grade 11

But yeah, Sine/Cosine/Arctangent are the only trig functions I use outside of, you guessed it, calculus.

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Jul - General Chat - Dear calculus: New poll - New thread - New reply


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