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by gtk40 3887 days ago
Same for my school, though our discrete might be a bit less basic. I talked to the department head about it, specifically about calculus, and his answer was that in 30+ years of industry experience, getting a CS PhD (from an engineering university), etc. he had never used calculus in programming except as a type of problem to solve. He suggested people looking to go into fields that might require it to do a math or physics minor, but he saw no need to have everyone do it to get the major.
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I find calculus to be a very useful set of mental models for framing problems, even if I'm not doing actual calculations with it. Understanding things like continuity, convergence, boundary conditions, gradients, etc... Almost everything you learn in a calculus course is a general problem-solving technique. (I'll say the same thing about Topology.)