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Went to visit my family for the weekend and saw my sister, a Pharm.D. major, doing her Calculus II homework. What direct bearing does Calculus II have on her ability to be a good pharmacist?
It immediately brought back bitter memories and fired me up. Once upon a time, I was turned off by a CS major because I'm lousy at Calculus. Likewise to pharmacy, what direct bearing does Calculus have on my ability to read and write code?
Just looking for opinions on this issue. I feel that these courses are a big waste of student's time and money towards the pursuit of their major.
Pharmacy is a lot closer to home for me, so I have a few examples of practical usage of calculus in pharmacy. One of the cornerstones of pharmacy, kinetics, is pretty much all calculus. A simple example:
If you know that a drug has a physiological half life of 1 hour 35 minutes, what dose would you give so that the concentration in the blood is 1 mg drug per liter of blood 8 hours later?
A drug is metabolized at a rate proportional to the concentration of a protein involved in inflammatory response. The protein's concentration is modeled by a differential equation that has the drug's analog as a variable as well as something simple like white blood cell count. Therefore, the optimum dose of the drug will depend on the patient's white blood cell count. How do you calculate the optimum dose?
I don't program much anymore but I don't think you got very far into a CS major if you didn't see how calculus is fundamental to programming. The fundamental job of the programmer is to turn real world problems into something that can be solved using polynomials and linear algebra, as all of the 'under the hood' processing that a computer does is just adding and multiplying vectors and matrices.
If you want to set up networks or install hardware or something technical, you don't nead calculus and you don't need a CS degree. If you want to understand error correction, physics engines, search optimization, graphics, encryption, simulation and prediction, or many other ubiquitous topics you will need calculus at the minimum and quite a bit more, especially group theory and dynamical systems. I am sure there are people that work in the CS field that don't ever use calculus, but only a pretty crappy school would limit their graduates to those positions.
If a pharmacist is a machine for counting pills then clearly math is unnecessary. If an understanding of the underlying biochemical processes is useful then math and science is valuable. Apparently the designers of the curriculum think the latter.
There are rather few professions where an understanding of rates (derivatives) and accumulation over time (integrals) is NOT useful. If that is the only thing that is remembered from calculus then the time is well spent.
I sometimes think that an education in math and science should be required for voters. Or at least politicians. Without it one cannot think clearly about interest rates, the national debt, global warming, etc. etc.
Basically, Calculus and Physics serve as weed out courses to separate the strong from the meek.
You wont need Calc for anything to be a doctor either but those courses help weed out those who are pre med and can't cut it (aka everybody freshman year)
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