When the deadline for your papers are approaching, when your competitors are closing in and about to scoop you, when you're using calculus in order to make financial trading decisions, etcetera.
Yeah but not to the same degree or in the same way. Having to sit in a room with no sources for an hour and shit out some test answers is not really same as having weeks to apply yourself with access to appropriate resources, references, and guidance from more senior coworkers.
The way I see it, you should be able to do calculus without pen or paper, so certainly without references or guidance.
If you want to be creative the first step is to put the problem in your head so that you can actually ponder it. If you have to pour over references and look things up, then you're not in the game any more than you can play chess if you have to look up the rules as you play.
This doesn't align with my experience writing software and applying maths to engineering problems. I am working a lot with statistics in my current role but if you asked me to take a stats test, I would almost certainly fail without references. Does this mean I am bad a stats? Perhaps? Does it matter? No.
> If you want to be creative the first step is to put the problem in your head so that you can actually ponder it. If you have to pour over references and look things up, then you're not in the game any more than you can play chess if you have to look up the rules as you play.
It seems like you are confusing the problems with the solutions. If you can understand the problem well enough, the solution will become obvious, even if you never took the math class--at least that's how it works for me. I do best when I have an actual real-world problem to solve, not a conceptual one created by an instructor.
So you have all the Laplace transforms memorized just in case some internet person asks you how to model a wheel going up a ramp at the origin?
Everyone on my engineering course did this question, but my guess is zero of us could solve it right now from memory. A fair portion would be able to solve it with some references available.
But you're making the other guy's point for him here. It's a waste of your mind to have test-taking skills memorized.
No, it's completely against my philosophy to memorize things just to remember; and things like Laplace transforms you look up in 'Beta: mathematics handbook' which you're typically allowed to bring to tests in engineering and in applied physics, at least here in Sweden.
What I mean is that if you know calculus you can do it fluently, like a language. You don't remember the solution, you calculate it, preferably in your head.
Edit: Though, back at my university tests took five hours, and I understand one or two hours is normal in America, and I could imagine that those shorter tests mean that there's more memorization and less sensible study.
It's acceptable to look things up that don't matter.
The way I see it, you should have the machinery in your head, so that you can derive things if pressed, and you should have the ability to work largely in your head and actually ponder things, but you shouldn't necessarily memorize formulas.
For example, I haven't even memorized the formula for the quadratic equation, I just complete the square in my head every time.
I think it's important to end up knowing them and to end up being able to calculate with paper and pencil to some degree and because calculus is very basic it's something one should be able to do in that way.
You should be able to imagine a right angle triangle sitting on the hypotenuse of another right angled triangle and figure out the x and y coordinates of the corner and how to get the sum of angles formulas from that, or to in general imagine things from calculus, like how the product rule can move what what is differentiated from one function to another etcetera.
I've never worked in a company where we were time constrained or stressed. I could always tell my boss "it's not going to be done by the deadline" and he'd have to come up with a way to do plan B.
Then it's not necessarily a "deadline", but a suggestion.
Most of the time it's better to do something the right way than to artificially hurry developers to hack something together that will bite you later in the form of bugs
Yes, although in this I was thinking less about software and the like as such and more about things like pricing derivatives contract that somebody wants and things like that, and of course, then you must do the right computation.
Everything is time constrained.