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 Calculus” (1952), which is not a casual read. Once, as a student and then practicing scientist/engineer, that all meant something to me in detail. It was required stuff of my college freshman curriculum.

Now I retain only a shadow of it, but the learning still frames my understanding of what is required and practiced by others today, to explain phenomena in the universe, including our tiny Earth. Maybe, in a less obvious way, it also informs the artistic expression of objects and beings by the depth of perception imparted.

The same is surely true for other studies that are not directly in the successful artist’s overt consciousness, but certainly in her/his peripheral vision, including: history, philosophy, poetry, chemistry, physics and so forth. They all inform the mind. A philosopher should, to flip the coin, have some comprehension of art, for example, and of calculus for that matter.

So, at what am I getting? Academic studies and reading habits both should be as broad and deep as possible. It is worth adding that the above specialties were not always delineated from a blended pool of knowledge. There was a Natural Philosophy to encompass all science once, when much less was understood. On the other hand, modern molecular biology, for example, is a specialty now, an important discipline in its own right, one blossoming out of figuring out the structure of DNA. The structure was only just revealed in the early 1950s by James Watson and Francis Crick. As a result, molecular biology is of the modern vernacular, not subsumed in Natural Philosophy.

Surely, a painter of life’s figures is helped to be creative by knowing the molecular basis of life itself. How can one project life onto canvass in a creative way, beyond that for example of early classicists, without knowing or sensing something about the double helix?

To summarize, there are two important takeaways to be had, at least, the first about formal education, the second about informal: (1) Formal: The college curriculum should always require broadening, core coursework before diving the student into career-based studies like computer science or commercial art; college should not be trade school; (2) Informal: Many are the diverse tools of literacy to be found in Libraries. Above all, selectively banning books, whether in one’s own mind, as say a young artist, or in Libraries, because of differing viewpoints or capacities, robs of diversity and is a crime against literacy. It narrows the scope of literacy. It is like banning calculus because it is hard to understand.