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My five year old asked me what calculus is.
(pixelfed.crimedad.work)
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/56031
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.crimedad.work/post/56030
cross-posted from: https://pixelfed.crimedad.work/p/crimedad/664838819785277759
My five year old asked me what calceulus is.
The context is that I'm an engineer and she wanted to know what I learned in engineering school, so I said calculus. (In my case, I only made it to pre-calc in highschool.) I swear I'm not the type of parent to try and push this stuff on her. I said it's about understanding how things change and then I tried to illustrate it. I'm open to suggestions on how I could answer her better.
This is an excellent illustration imo. I would say the most essential concepts to wrap ones head around are rate of change and fundamental quantities. From there you can get to the relationships between position, velocity, acceleration and use these an analogy going forward. Awesome parenting by the way!
Thank you. It's a tough question to answer for her because, in comparison, the problems solved by addition, subtraction, and multiplication (into which she is only just dipping her toe) are mostly obvious to her. I'm having a hard time thinking of the obvious problems that calculus solves.