Daniel Davies wrote: `` god's sake learn basic calculus everybody... it is unbelievably frustrating to the rest of us to have to spell out what we mean in any discussion of rates of change with respect to things..''
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I agree. In the middle of grad school in art, I decided to kill an old dog that had plagued me since high school, a fear of math. So I took the Math 1 series (calculus and analytic geometry). I hadn't taken a math class since geometry, so it practically killed me to get Cs, but I did it.
That math series and a couple of philosophy classes were the best thing I ever took in college. They seriously added to my ability to analyze the world I live in.
DD is right though on the other point. Math is taught in the US with the specific purpose of weeding people out, starting with 8th grade algebra, which I managed to flunk and repeat, hence the clammy hands as I signed up years later for Math 1 at Cal.
So what are the uses of it for art? Well, it helped me to deconstruct what was going on in the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment, because the development of the ideas in calculus were integral to creating these periods, with the most spectacular effects in visual perspective and architecture. One of the most interesting things about calculus was its finalization into numerical form which matched almost year by year the wild swings of the French Revolution, i.e. the origin of the modern state with its national academies, its monetary systems, measurement, statistics, vast military campaigns, and the generalized idea that human society can be modeled, controled, and moved in specific directions of `revolutionary' change (sciences of man, i.e. turn people into numbers, rationalize society, etc.)
It is still doing the same work today, only vastly more so with the aid of computers.
It was interesting to read that Iran's current president was trained as a civil engineer.
CG