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by jhck 3406 days ago
In a book review from 1988 [1, p. 892] the mathematician Underwood Dudley claimed:

> First-semester calculus has NO applications.

That said, the central ideas of calculus are firmly grounded in daily life (as Strang points out in the video): Differential calculus is about investigating speed (or, more generally, rate of change), and integral calculus is about investigating area.

[1]: http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/0002989051112.di99173...