Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calculus classes

Re:Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calcul... by yummyfajitas on Monday April 14, 2008 @05:34PM (#163533)

Quite right. I've been teaching calculus for several years, and for the most part it is a soul-sucking experience. Big chunks of it are utterly pointless. The main goal of the class is attrition.

Seriously, integrating 1/(1+x^2)? Surfaces of revolution? Trig/hyperbolic trig substitution? Calc is full of stupid tricks that buy you closed form solutions.

Adding Big-O notation to calc might help a little, especially when you get to series (with Big-O notation, you can explain divergent series). It's certainly a useful topic, and I can think of a dozen topics from calc I'd love to replace with it.

Eliminating calculus and designing a basic math class from scratch would probably help a lot more.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calcul... by Pioneer1 on Monday April 14, 2008 @06:10PM (#163544)

I agree with this. The same goes for physics as well. Both physics and calculus look like humongous legal code created by a bureaucracy. They were intended to solve 18th century problems. The idea of creating a new version of these from scratch is a good idea. Why not eliminate calculus altogether and teach computer science instead, including programming?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calcul... by yummyfajitas on Monday April 14, 2008 @06:34PM (#163557)

Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Calculus is a fundamental topic, and even in computer science. Trig substitution is the bathwater. Curvature, tangent and normal are the baby, and they can be handy when you need them.

[ Parent | on HN ]