| From: | Matthew Garrett |
| Date: | 28 Aug 2000 at 22:05:11 |
| Subject: | Re: OT GCSE Results |
On Mon, Aug 28, 2000 at 09:40:24PM +0100, Jonathan Drain wrote:
> Biology, I passed easily, it's just about facts, naming parts of animals
> and plants and understanding the basic processes of how they work.
> Additional Maths though... it's pointless, I mean, they're teaching us
> how to 'differentiate' and 'integrate' and how to find various numbers
> >from various other numbers... what use, apart from perhaps Quantum
> Mechanics, could this kind of maths have? More to the point, what the
> hell does it all mean?
Say you have a car that's accelerating. This means that its speed is
changing at a rate of some description. Differentiation gives the rate at
which something is changing, which means that the first differential of
speed is acceleration (ie, the rate at which the speed is changing) and
the second differential the rate at which the acceleration is changing.
Integration is simply the inverse. Calculus is a fairly simple concept,
but an amazingly powerful tool - A level physics and maths depend on it
heavily. The small amount of quantum theory covered at A level doesn't
involve much calculus at all, as far as I can remember, but the
traditional mechanics uses a huge amount of it.
I'd explain it to you, but your head would explode.
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