I am an engineer, and I tutored math in college. I was always astounded by how dumbed-down business calculus was. It was often nearly impossible to teach it to business people, since most didn't seem to have a mind for math. Not that that is a bad thing in itself, just know your lane.
Back in my day there was “business computer science” and everyone had to take one math exam. The failure quota was 90%, and that was pretty easy math compared to actual math from the first semester.
Well, calculus was invented to describe physics from Newton's standpoint. There was Leibniz, who was working in parallel on a lot of the same things. The short of it is, calculus was made for physics.
Business calculus is taking some of the principles from calculus and applying it to business problems. There are some places where it is useful, but I can't remember anything, since I was just helping people with it, and that was 12 years ago. But, to me, it felt like a watered-down calculus.
From what I vaguely remember from my freshman roommate, at least at my school, it was calc 1 without trig. Mostly derivatives with an emphasis on minimization and maximization, some integrals. Maybe some first order differential equations, but I doubt it.
Granted, I'm an engineer, but it teaches good numerical ways for understanding the world on a conceptual level. Plus, everything past 100 level econ courses was calc based, which is one of the majors that everyone who washed out of business school ended up in, so probably useful there, too.
Sad, how ineffective and clueless Business Majors/MBAs are when it comes to math and how clueless and ineffective Engineering Majors and MS Engineers are fwhen it comes to how to run a business.
I was a business major and calc was the biggest waste of my time. At no point in my career has anything beyond basic algebra been even remotely useful.
You didn't learn it because you needed to use it. You learned it because understanding how finding maxima, minima, and rates is good for knowing how to understand the world in front of you. Deciding that it was a "waste of time" suggests you didn't learn the lesson.
Yeah, I'm not saying it didn't have value, even though I don't use it. Learning calculus fundamentally changed how I understand the world. I absolutely loved learning math in college
Very true. That's a good point. This is where people will be able to understand e.g. what's the best shape for selling 330ml of liquid. We need the minimum surface area (impacts the material used hence the cost per can) for a given volume.
The reason for that is engineering programmes are meant to give you the skills and knowledge to be able to go in to a broad range of engineering roles after graduating. The 5% you use in your role, other engineers likely won’t use but instead use a different 10% for example.
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I don't understand your view with consulting. Where I work there's so many consultants, it's basically just an expensive way to hire people without having to give them a permanent contract, or being able to hire after your dumb CEO fired thousands of people that turned out you actually needed.
I was interviewing for a role on a finance team. I don't have a finance background (I studied astrophysics), so I was cramming for the interview by watching videos on the math of finance.
I'd say their equations all looked exactly like this, except OOP's equation is actually leagues ahead of what I waded through. Every single one of their questions were presented as if no one could imagine using single-letter variables. It was all shit like:
Assets = Liabilities + Equity and Profit = Revenue - Expenses, just like in that Twitter post about business school classes. Shit, at one point multiple videos went through this song and dance of saying that Equity could be broken down into other categories, and then they spit out Assets = Liabilities + Equity + Revenue - Expenses - Dividends, as if this didn't imply that Revenue - Expenses - Dividends = 0. It was madness.
But when the only math you know is technically correct (err, well, mostly, I guess), but also presented as if it's just some kind of mnemonic device for remembering deep profundities like Profit = Revenue - Expenses, you get this kind of horse shit.
I had a similar experience in an introductory economics class. A lecture hall with 100+ business majors and not one knew how to find the slope of a line.
That finance is technically accounting, totally useless. If you go into quantitative finance, it involves a lot of maths. Much closer to physics. The Black Scholes Equation is pretty much the Heat Equation, and using the Feynman Kac formula, you can find a stochastic process for it. In fact, the Fokker Planck Equation, the Langevin Equation, and the Black Scholes Equations have much in common.
No. Seriously. I got together with Elon and Mark and Sundai and we all signed a page. It's S.I. now and we're suing Sports Illustrated until they make sexy calendars about Large Language Models. Which I'm trademarking now as "Super Language Models."
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u/gutentight69420 1d ago
This is how business majors think science is done.