/sci/ - Science & Math

What the fuck is the point of Taylor Series? Like, how many practical application are centered around taking a function we already know and expressing it as an infinite sum?

in high school AP BC calc my teacher continuously said that taylor and maclaurin series are just useless to learn (besides for the app test itself) because we have the tools to approximate and calculate exact answers. he believed that these series seem obsolete. do other people in the higher math fields feel this way as well? or is there some use for them that my teacher was too stupid to know about? should we just flat out ditch this content for (mainly high school) courses (or even drop them in higher education) ?