/sci/ - Science & Math

Calculus II (as per the typical American course) is a complete waste of time. I'm not a disgruntled student in calculus II. I just graduated with a math degree and did the baby analysis and so on.

Why on Earth do we waste so many people's time teaching them how to calculate obscure integrals? All they really need is to be able to integrate polynomials, integration by parts, sin/cos, maybe a few other tricks here and there.

They will likely never encounter integrals like these; if they do they can easily reference a text .

This is precious effort and time that could be much better spent learning some basic properties of real numbers (Archimedean property, basic proofs of Cauchy convergence) which would in turn provide a much better preparation for the study of limits and series convergence/divergence typically covered towards the end of a Calculus II course. They could also introduce students to the idea of elementary and transcendental functions so that they recognize that most of the functions one might conjure up can only be approximated as definite integrals.

Who the hell designs this stuff?