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by pompino
775 days ago
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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. |
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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.