[bilbo0s]

I accidentally voted your comment up.

I meant to vote it down.

Calculus is not basic math. And many students find it difficult. I remember Calculus 3, in particular, was hard for me. Now I look back at Green's Theorem, Lagrange multipliers, Vector fields and surface integrals and it all seems so basic. But that was NOT the case for the 17 year old me sitting in that big lecture hall.

[nudetayne]

Thanks for mentioning the ever-important votes! They mean so much to me.

Many students find It difficult because they have bad teachers, bad textbooks, or both. Also, in the future, spouting off math-related terms doesn't really add anything to the discussion. Anyone can open a book and look at the table of contents and copy some unfamiliar words down.

[bilbo0s]

Didn't mean to offend you guy.

As a rule, whenever I accidentally up or down vote someone, I leave a message explaining the mistake and my reasoning. Doesn't happen often... but I always thought of it as a courtesy. Again... no offense was intended.

On the question of math topics not adding anything to the discussion. Well, we'll need to agree to disagree. The point was that Calculus... is NOT an easy subject to learn. And you get a sense of how esoteric it seems to an initiate by looking at the topics it encompasses.

Finally, try to relax a little man... no need to get snippy on HN. We should be able to have a discussion on a, relatively uncontroversial topic, without getting emotional.

[nudetayne]

You didn't offend me, I guess my sarcasm wasn't evident. I just find the voting system to be pointless. I also don't know how you thought I was being emotional.

As for calculus, it's incredibly easy to learn - you just need the correct book. Most students don't know that unfortunately. Inventing calculus on the other hand isn't easy, but fortunately most of that has been done for us.