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Calculus made easy
(lemmy.world)
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
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.
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.
All of geometry is a cult. The only kind I like. Math cult. Good people. Great orgies.
I oppose math cults because I’m a member of bean cults. Our orgies are better, it’s the health benefits of beans
Sure. They 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.