[techcode]

Why pointing out Calculus as opposed to just Math?

Might be just my Eastern Europe background where it was all just "Math" and both equations (that's Algebra I guess) and simpler functions/analysis (Calculus?) are taught in elementary school around age 14 or 15.

Maybe I'm missing/forgetting something - I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.

[KptMarchewa]

In my central european university we've learned "Real Analysis" that was way more concerned about theorems and proofs rather than "calculating" something - if anything, actually calculating derivatives or integrals was a warmup problem to the meat of the subject.

[cafed00d]

Calculus, because all of engineering depends critically on the modeling of real world phenomena using ordinary or partial differential equations.

I don’t mean to disregard other branches of math — of course they’re useful — but calculus stands out in specific _applicability_ to engineering.

Literally every single branch of engineering. All o then. Petrochemical engineering to Biotech. They all use calculus as a fundamental block of study.

Discovering new drugs using Pk/Pd modeling is driven by modeling then drug<->pathogen repo as cycles using Lotka models.

Im not saying engineers dont need to learn stats or arithmetic. IMO those are more fundamental to _all_ fields, janitors or physicians or any field really. But calculus is fundamental to engineering alone.

Perhaps, a begrudging exception I can make is its applications in Finance.

But every other field where people build rockets, cars, airplanes, drugs, or ai robots, you’d need proficiency in calculus just as much as you’d need proficiency in writing or proficiency in arithmetic.

[pompino]

True, we learnt calculus before college in my home country - but it was just basic stuff. But I learnt a lot more of it including partial derivatives in first year of engineering college.

>I think I used Calculus more during electrical engineering than for computer/software engineering.

I think that was OPs point - most engineering disciplines teach it.

[cafed00d]

Yeah computer science went through this weird offshoot for 30-40 years where calculus was simply taught because of tradition.

It was not really necessary through all of the app developers eras. In fact, it’s so much so the case that many software engineers graduating from 2000-2015 or so work as software engineers without a degree in BS. Rather, they could drop the physics & calculus grind and opt for a BA in computer science. They then went on to become proficient software engineers in the industry.

It’s only after the recent advances of AI around 2012/2015 did a proficiency in calculus become crucial to software engineering again.

I mean, there’s a whole rabbit hole of knowledge on the reason why ML frameworks deal with calculating vector-Jacobian or Jacobian-vector products. Appreciating that and their relation to gradient is necessary to design & debug frameworks like PyTorch or MLX.

Sure, I will concede that a sans-calculus training (BA in Computer Science) can still be sufficiently useful to working as an ML engineer in data analytics, api/services/framework design, infrastructure, systems engineering, and perhaps even inference engineering. But I bet all those people will need to be proficient in calculus the more they have to deal with debugging models.