<p>I’m in pre-calc right now and I feel everything is comparative to Chem 101 where you only work with salt water. I’m getting a little bored with how easy and repetitive the math has been. I placed into Calculus but decided to take precalc as a refresher since it’s been a couple years since my last math class but I’m beginning to wish I had just jumped into Calculus.</p>
<p>When do I get to start working with real chemicals persay? I still need to take Calc 1 & 2 and linear algebra/diff equations which I plan to take concurrently with multivariable calculus. (good idea or no?)</p>
<p>I’m going for a degree in financial engineering so I’m looking to get more into the mindset of having to develop and test algorithms. When does the fun stuff start??</p>
<p>I never cared much for math until I hit calculus. Calculus drew together all of the math that I had learned up to that point to build a theory both elegant and powerful. My high school calculus class inspired me to major in math in college, and now I am a PhD student in mathematics. So I would say that math gets fun when you hit calculus!</p>
<p>To each his own. However, I thought math got more interesting with calculus and then got much more fun when I started taking optimization and probability classes. I was a operations research major in college.</p>
<p>Careful with overlapping math classes. At least at some schools they would expect you to have the multivariate calc prior to taking diffy qs. I’d check with the math department.</p>
<p>I’ll agree with b@r!um, it sort of starts with calculus. But calculus itself isn’t that fun, though you get hints of where math can go from there. When I started as a math major, I remember that analysis was like calculus without all the fun, and algebra (groups, rings and fields, etc; not symbolic manipulation) was neat, but I really enjoyed courses like probability, dynamic systems and other applied courses more. And it gets more fun as you go further and your own tastes develop. </p>
<p>I went on to do grad school in statistics, because, to paraphrase John Tukey, you get to play in everyone else’s backyard. You can dabble in any science discipline through statistics. You can turn coffee into theorems if you want, you can do data analysis if that’s what you like, you can come up with new methods to analyze and get the right perspective in the data inundated world we live in. You can find a job anywhere you’d like. You can be a code monkey, a consultant for industry, government, NGOs, banks, you can teach, you name it.</p>
<p>Calculus I-III, diff eqs. etc. are all snooze fests. It’s nothing more than solving for X or manipulating some equation, a computer can easily do all of that. The real interesting math starts when you actually start doing math–proofs and abstract thinking. Abstract algebra is light years more interesting than calculus or diff eqs. Logic is probably the most interesting field out of all math (pretty much IS philosophy), but is quite useless in the practical world.</p>
<p>Who would have ever thought there are an infinite different sizes of infinity?</p>
<p>I have found Differential Equations a very entertaining course. Much more so than Calculus 1-3. It is a ton of interesting application so you can see how what you are learning can apply to other fields.</p>
<p>Calc 2. It was so incredible that functions can be broken into series. There was also a section on numerical methods (Simpson’s Rule) that I wish I could have spent a whole semester on.</p>
<p>Numerical methods get to be fun when you use them to, say, draw non-elliptical stable orbits or model heat diffusion of a space shuttle on re-entry. It gets even more fun when you learn to do integrals the statistician’s way, by generating random numbers. It may appear silly in one dimension, but in high dimensions it’s much more efficient. </p>
<p>Of course, you have lots of different types of mathematicians, you have your purists who just want to live in the perfect, platonic realm of ideas. You have the anal analysts. The workaholic number-theorists. The computer-wiz numerical people. The gambling probabilists. The artistic geometers… the random statisticians. The list goes on. Of course, everyone has their favorite branch, and some think all the other branches suck. It’s true in all fields of science.</p>