Comment on Apparently your hobbies becomes less interesting if you're forced to do them all the time? Who knew?
captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 17 hours agoSee that seems like the kind of thing Matt Parker would make a video about, “Someone noticed a weird pattern in some numbers.” Like how 2 pi or the fibonacci sequence keep turning up in nature, and I just can’t muster up much more than a “…huh” about it. I mean I understand margesimpsonpotato.jpg but if you want me to do calculus you’re gonna have to bring me more than “I just think they’re neat.”
PM_ME_VINTAGE_30S@lemmy.sdf.org 15 hours ago
Fair lol. IMO you kinda gotta be fucked in the head to like calculus. But I am fucked in the head, so it works for me 🤷
Personally, calculus is really where I fell in love with math. I had 0% interest in math at all until I took calculus. And also, I’m in one of the few positions where I actually use calculus all the time (PhD student in electrical engineering).
But also, I do music production as a hobby. And music production is, under the hood, real-time math. For example, audio equalizers are basically just doing real-time integration for you. You can absolutely do music production without calculus, in fact 99.9% of people do, but it’s been so helpful for my creativity to actually understand at that level what filters (and other things) do. So to me, at least in my autistic brain, math, calculus in particular, is part of everything I do, even my hobbies and free time and dreams and everything.
Oh, and computers can do calculus now, even with symbols. If you install its symbolic toolbox, GNU Octave will do it for free on a potato. So even if you don’t want to slog through the algebra, it’s super easy to just fuck around with calculus and a computer.