<p>Many people (including teachers) have told me that Calculus 3 is a pointless class and will never be used even in engineering majors. If I plan on majoring in a non-theory major (biomed), is it wise to not take Calculus 3 at all?</p>
<p>Calc 1-3 are required Mathematic sequence courses which all engineers must take, at least in most schools.</p>
<p>Many calc III concepts are the basis for physics making it very important for engineers. If you ever get a chance to look through a book and check out the application problems, you will notice that many of them have to deal with curvature, flow and circulation, and many other engineering problems with multivariable applications which you will need to know to keep cars on the road, your bridge from falling into the river, or determine how to maximize the efficiency of an engine, the list goes on and on. I would question anyone who said that calc III was a pointless class, especially for engineering.</p>
<p>Calc 3 is the first class about more than two dimensional objects.
How many things do you build as an engineer which have just two dimensions?</p>
<p>There, I answered your question. And technically you will never do those integrations from any calc course since it is all done numerically and you are too lowly educated to derive formulas yourself, but then you could say that all maths courses except numerical methods are useless to an engineer.</p>
<p>The thing is of course that they want you to have a basic understanding of what the computer is calculating, otherwise you can get some really ridiculous errors.</p>
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<p>They are idiots. If you want to study physics, then pretty much everything you learn in calculus III is useful. </p>
<p>Is the class required in your biomed program?</p>
<p>I’m a BME major. Take calc III. Take as much math as you can.</p>
<p>The thing that separates engineers from technicians is math & science.</p>