[TriinT]

I would claim that Calculus isn't that important for engineers / scientists / programmers either. Real Analysis is important if one needs to understand thing deeper. In the real world, problems can't be solved analytically... and many of the tools one learns in Calculus are kind of useless. I think Linear Algebra is much, much more important than Calculus. Linear Algebra is the arithmetic of higher mathematics, like Bellman said.

[jknupp]

>In the real world, problems can't be solved analytically...

Your other suggestions notwithstanding, you and I live in a very different "real world" my fried.

[slackenerny]

real world

Tell that to physicists “renormalizing”† it over and over all days long…

† I almost forgot not everyone on HN may know what that is, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renormalization

[TriinT]

If you can solve your problems analytically, then you're either working in a blessed field, or you're working with simplistic models...