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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: June 24th, 2025

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  • . . . the fundamental ideas about rates of change seem like they’re something that everyone human deserves to be exposed to.

    People understand the idea of instantaneous speed intuitively. The trouble is giving it a rigorous mathematical foundation, and that’s what calculus does. Take away the rigor, and you can teach the basic ideas to anyone with some exposure to algebra. 6th grade, maybe earlier. It’s not particularly remarkable or even that useful for most people.

    When you go into a college major that requires calculus, they tend to make you take it all over again no matter if you took it in high school or not.

    Probability and statistics are far more important. We run into them constantly in daily life, and most people do not have a firm grounding in them.