[jiaweihli]

I was decent at math pre-college - placed in top 5 in several state-level competitions, and enjoyed my fair share of more obscure branches that weren't traditionally taught in school (number theory, combinatorics).

I agree with the majority of the author's points, but I despise his quick judgement on freshman students complaining about calculus.

I also said the same 'ironically stupid thing' in my freshman year, but that's because I _dreaded_ doing calculus as it's traditionally taught. It's much harder to find elegance in calculus than it is in say, algebra or geometry. (Mostly because the 'grunt' work behind it is so much more tedious.) Those are similar to programming in the sense that coding has elegant, extensible solutions and quick, dirty hacks. With calculus, I always felt like I was a inadequate human version of Mathematica.

More simply put, I could always solve problems using shortcuts in high school both to save time and to give myself more of a mental challenge. In intro calculus classes, there is no such thing.

[jimmaswell]

I'd say derivatives/integrals being applied to velocity/acceleration/etc, and using integrals to find volumes of revolution and such, are pretty elegant.

[jiaweihli]

I agree with you here, but I meant more from a process rather than application perspective.

By analogy, it's like choosing to use options / maybe monad instead of null in a service that takes input. The end service's functionality is the same regardless! (maintainability might be a different matter though, hehe)