Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nnq | Hacker News Reader

Purely anecdotical, but most of the women with a STEM education or interest I've heard from had a strong visceral dislike for calculus and strong attraction towards algebra.

And not in the US. And also including mathematics graduates. "I'd take any abstract algebra problem/work anytime, just keep differential equations of all kinds away from me" was smth I've heard once if memory serves well...

And at at least in European countries, high school math puts strong focus on calculus because of the obvious applications in physics. If doing stuff with groupoids and matrices is you kick, you could just as well get labeled "not a math person" if you don't get integrals and derivatives well enough...

(Me personally, I'm a male with strong calculus intuition - "checking my privilege" here to be PC :) )

The upsetting thing about DiffEq is that the way it is taught has nothing to do with the way it is practiced or used, either by mathematicians or engineers. Separable equations, for example, are the highest order of bullshit. Almost no interesting problems are separable. (Like, there are infinitely more inseparable than separable ones.)

The track that should really take over should be one where the student develops the intuition about what related rates of change mean, and then abandon the chicanery of these special-case tricks in favor of the numerical solution of DiffEqs and the evaluation of the quality of the solutions.

I always found differential equations required a few, key insights and then a lot of grunt work. Pages and pages of algebra. You have to be sure you're right The whole time or it all comes apart.

But the hard part of calc 1 (for me at least) wasn't the calculus; the concepts are simple. The hard part was figuring out how to apply those concepts to the problem at hand and then grinding through the pages of algebra to get the result.

So, it seems to me that someone with an affinity toward algebra would do just fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com