Comment on Calculus made easy
rekabis@lemmy.ca 4 months ago
Calculus was never an issue for me. I could do double-integral calculus in my head clear into my forties. I’ve just gotten rusty since then, likely with a spot of practice I could pull off that party trick again.
No, the only part of math that ever struck fear into my heart was trigonometry. Sin, cos, tan, that kind of stuff. For some reason I have never been able to grok, on a fundamental level, the basics of trig. I understand things on a high/intellectual level, just not on an instinctual level.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 months ago
Wait what? It’s all triangles. We just know the ratios because of the way they are. I can arcsin my way through all my problems.
Physics is what made Calc make sense. Trig is what made physics make sense.
NegativeInf@lemmy.world 4 months ago
All of geometry is a cult. The only kind I like. Math cult. Good people. Great orgies.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 4 months ago
I oppose math cults because I’m a member of bean cults
RobertoOberto@sh.itjust.works 4 months ago
Sure. The relate different properties of triangles or periodic phenomena.
But can you explain what a “sine” operation is actually doing? Algebra and calculus can pretty much all be explained in terms of basic operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. But. I’m in the same boat as @rekabis@lemmy.ca - trig operations feel like a black box where one number goes in and a different number comes out. I am comfortable using them and understand their patterns, but don’t really get them.