The mathematics curriculum that we have is based on a foundation of arithmetic and algebra. And everything we learn after that is building up towards one subject. And at top of that pyramid, it’s calculus. And I’m here to say that I think that that is the wrong summit of the pyramid … that the correct summit — should be statistics: probability and statistics.
—
Arthur Benjamin, in his TED talk.
I couldn’t agree more. Learning calculus for the first time was a mind expanding experience. However, in my day to day work as a software engineer I almost never have to use calculus, but do often have to wonder about questions such as “what is the probability distribution of this random variable which is the sum of these two other random variables with their own distributions?”
