Quote:
Originally Posted by jmanela
How much to engineers actually use calculus? What is the proportion of Non-Calc vs. Calc computations?
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[3rd Aeronautical Engineering Student Perspective]
I haven't walked into a class this semester that didn't use calculus.
That said, you find in engineering that most integrals are too gross (or time consuming) to do by hand. As Ether said, you'll have Mathematica, MATLAB, a calculator, or Maple to actually do the integration. In my experience, you will be expected to know what an integral means, what a derivative is and be able to integrate polynomials and sine/cosine, but that is about it. There will not be a surprise test question asking you to find the volume of some complicated curve rotated about the x-axis.
Engineering is all about assumptions, and you'll find that lots of these assumptions turn integrals into algebra. Probably 80% of my Aerodynamics notes are integrals, but only 30% of the homework is.