In Defense of Calc

Once upon a time a budding young artist said to me of calculus that she did not need to know it at all, because she would never use it. The point is highly debatable, by the following argument. Any good artist, like any other successful professional, needs to be able to create anew. Artists create; engineers create. That premise seems too obvious to require further comment.. And it points to being able to think in multiple dimensions, laterally and backward/forward in time for example, perhaps even in several dimensions at once. Calculus is one of those dimensions. Calculus is another way of seeing the world, in mathematical terms that include vectors, differential functions, integration, infinite series, and complex numbers. Those are chapter words in Wilfred Kaplan’s “Advanced Cal…