• Fat TonyOP
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    3 months ago

    So let’s take a random graph. You ever wonder what the the exact slope of a random angle is? Well with differentiation you can actually use maths to figure this out.

    Normally you would take two points near each other, draw perhaps a line and see how close you can get. But at some point in time mathematicians started wondering if you can actually get the formula for the slope between two points where the two points are actually put over each other. And turns out you can!

    This phenomenal discovery let to huge breakthroughs in maths as a whole. Including the discovery of integration. Which is in simple terms the opposite of differentiation. Only this time it’s not so much for the slope but the for the entire area of a graph. For if you reverse it you can actually get the exact size of a surface.

    • @ramirezmike@programming.dev
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      153 months ago

      I had pretty terrible math education in school but as an adult I’ve gotten into programming and making video games and every time I learn a math concept I think “wow, math is even cooler than I thought” but the main part stopping me from learning some concepts is not having a practical example.

      I vaguely know differentiation and integration… I think it might be the correct way to describe things like determining/applying acceleration to an object over time… but when I read your description I really don’t understand…

      I think that’s in general what I run into with math. it’s cool and amazing when I get it, but a lot of the descriptions of concepts have a lot of assumptions about the reader sometimes to the point where to understand the description you’d have to already understand the concept.