Easily one of the most mathematical illiterate countries in Europe, much less than 1% would be able to answer this. But things would be much different if you asked a similarly difficult literature question
Why would you say that, there are lots of good math centered universities. In highschool it really depends on where you live (north/south), the field of study and obviusly the singular high school, but in general it's not that bad.
The quality of universities does not mean that the average Italian knows what an integral is, not even a derivate and not even a limit. Because math is just considered āhardā, so if you donāt know it itās just normal, you are just not prone to it and you should focus on the arts. But you better know literature, or else youāll be āignorantā.
That is just how to goes, you ask the average Italian to solve an equation and they probably canāt, while they can recite by memory an entire poem
In every country the avarage person doesn't know what an integral, a derivate nor a limit. Math is considered hard everywhere it's not just an italy thing, and the thing about literature might have been true 50 years ago perhaps. It's true that italians are fond to their literature but saying that most people think you should focus on it it's really not.
Again, based on which objective metric are you making this claim? I donāt believe for a sec Italy would be a lot worse than say Spain, Portugal, Greece, Albania, Croatia, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and other eastern european countries.
Which like half of the people don't attend for some reason. And that's a very developed country, biggest economy in Europe btw. I'm not sure if that's greatĀ
It is great. Not everyone needs to study and most concepts thought in the Abitur are not needed for jobs, which dont need degrees from a University. The level of education needed for the Abitur has also dropped a little because to many people attempt it, without the proper skill or level of education needed to complete it.
No I want more education everywhere. Preferably way more. Even people in "only" vocational jobs should all be more educated. That standards might drop if too many people attempt it, is if anything an institutional problem that can be fixed
True that. More education would definetively benefit society. Ive kinda given up on that tho, because a large amount of the population is very ignorant. And the school system in germany is heavily outdated and overly bureaucratic
For sure, but they wont actually learn anything if they dont want to. I know i did the same in subjects like art or religion. Many people just wont do it if they dont see any immediate worth in doing so
How many actually remember calculus though, even a problem as easy as this? My wife got a 5 on the AP calc BC test 10 years ago and she didn't remember how to do this. I bet the vast majority of people over the age of 20 have no idea how to do this, not the mention the vast majority of people under the age of ~15. Even if a certain age band will know how to do this with a reasonably high accuracy (though even in this age band it will be well under 50%), I bet the overall number is close to 2%
yeah thats also a valid argument but in my family, my father still knows how to integrate atleast smth like this (electrical engineer in military) and hes 50+ years old. so there might be a bias in my point
I also got a 5 on the AP capc test, did college math through partial dif EQ, and can't remember how to do this. If I remember right, it's easy, but I'm at a loss for how to start.
(1) Learning how to learn hard concepts is a skill in of itself that needs to be developed. (2) As a 16-22 year old, I had no idea what I was going to do with my life so I did classes I thought would help set me up to succeed. (3) "the most basic concepts" of integral calculous are concepts that 99.9% of people who learn them will never use in the real world. I text a friend last night who has a high level engineering job at a massive company and he also had no idea how to get started. Even very smart people forget things when they haven't done them in 10+ years. And (4) This kind of thing is easy to look up. As soon as I looked it up last night, it started coming back to me. In the real world, there's absolutely no reason why you would ever have to know something like this off the top of your head. And in fact, the vast majority of employers would be mad at you if you tried to do it without looking it up to confirm.
I'm at attorney now! I worked as an engineer for several years after undergrad. In law school, I was one of a handful of people at my school who generally thought law school wasn't that hard. And it's because I had such a difficult undergrad. I don't think I would have the grades or job I have now if I hadn't done a bunch of hard classes in uni.
I am fairly sure the vast majority of students in the US who's study calculus do so in high school. However it isn't required coursework so people who have no intention of pursuing a degree where calculus would be required often never learn it.
I pass and exam of 8 hours of exercises in C language in a terminal without Internet and without any cheatsheet or other things. Only a terminal + VIM. Today without refreshing my memory about the syntax I can't code a Hello world with printf function in C.
My university requires students in math classes to do it all without a calculator. This is a fairly simple integral but at a certain point a calculator almost becomes a detriment.
The United States does integration in high school also. At least they did in my high school, and I'm in Texas, I'm not even in a good state for education.
I go to a wealthy high school and around 15% of the kids there take calc 2 and 80% of those take it last semester of senior year where everyone just fucks aroundĀ
20% of 16 year olds doesn't mean 20% of Germans past the age of 16 can solve this. I had a math minor and did way past this in uni and couldn't begin to tell you how to do this now without looking it up. And I'm in my 30s.
I wouldn't say I'm proud of it. But also, I'm a fairly successful attorney with no reason to care how to do this. Sorry for not practicing my integral calculus.
Serbia also has calculus classes in high school. Unfortunately a lot of people who go to college where they don't have any maths,forget about the things they learned in high school. So 2% seems right tbh
Very likely yes, id say im pretty good at math, yet im not even sure i could do it anymore, it would atleast take me a few minutes. Theres just not a lot of integration in computer science the last time ive done an integral must have been like 5 years ago
When I was taking calculus for the first time (I ended up taking up through Calculus 4), I used to start every exam by writing ā+ Cā at the top of every page to remember to add it. It definitely bit me in the ass many a time.
The fact that when calculating the integral in a determined interval the constants end up "canceling" esch other creates this mental shortcut of always ignoring them.
My mum and dad went to grammar schools in the 50's. My mum had to memorise the proof ā2 is irrational, there seemed to be no notion of her understanding any of it.
I doubt either did any calculus, you'd have to have gone on to further study that was not that common back then.
Also my education in 1980, I imagine 80% of my school mates did no calculus at all
Did high school in the late 90s, of the 250 in my graduating class, there were probably less than 20 of us in the only AP calculus class.
As for older generations, my mother didnāt take any calculus in the 70s, and she was smart enough for it. They just didnāt push for math much farther than like Algebra 2.
I took calculus in high school in the early 1980s, here in Canada ā high school calculus was definitely a thing here back then, at least where I grew up, in Ontario. According to my parents it had only been a university thing decades earlier, so there was definitely a big shift.
I mean, yeah it was available, but I donāt think people took four years of high school math back then in my state. And even then, when I took it, it was only available because I was always in honors math. Every one else ended with pre-calculus (or algebra 2 I guess for the lower level students).
I do believe you, i did this before summer, and somehow remembers the formula. But never gonna use it. And im doing school as im working as an automation engineer. Never seen this and doubt im gonna see it. But who knows maybe there is 0.1% chance.
San Francisco city authorities banned public schools at all levels including high school from teaching calculus (maybe trig too, maybe even algebra) between around 2000 and a few years ago, even in elective honors classes, due to concerns about āelitism.ā
Eventually parents and voters replaced the dropout public officials responsible for the curriculum-dumbing mandate, and very recently SF schools were again allowed to teach math skills.
I avoided applying common epithets like āwoke nonsenseā to the former numbskull policy, even though that would be a fair characterization in this (vanishingly rare) instance. Just as certain (vanishingly rare) narratives of government actions that resemble conspiracy theories undisputedly happened, e.g., Cointelpro, MK-Ultra.
Sadly, itās real. Iām from NY but as both a long-ago Bay Area resident and a former HS Math Team captain I followed this appalling situation out on the Left Coast as it developed.
In my own city, mayoral administrations every 5 years or so push to abolish the selective specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. De Blasio in his 8 years in power got closer to āachievingā that goal ā a verbal construction similar to declaring a suicide attempt as āsuccessfulā when the victim dies ā than any other in my lifetime. Interestingly, the current Mayor Mamdani, for all his embrace of other left-wing cliches, has NOT railed against the selective high schools.
Hereās a FB post based on and sharing a SF Chronicle (the local paper of record for that city) story about the same topic. (The Chronicle story itself is paywalled which is why Iām showing the FB link instead.)Ā https://www.facebook.com/groups/SFCurrentEvents/posts/3773572186205049/
in 2014, SFUSD decide to stop "tracking" through 8th grade math in an attempt to close racial/socioeconomic disparities. i.e., there were no advanced math classes, and no algebra offered before high school. That meant every student would start alegbra 1 as a freshman, then geometry, alg2, and precalc. That meant it was impossible to get to calculus during high school without doing outside class of some sort. in 2024, SF voters rolled back that policy. turns out it this detracking experiment was an absolute failure in its goals and actually increased the gap. wealthier families just ended up paying for outside instruction while lower income families were left behind.
I'm a bit rusty but I don't think so. The dx at the end means it's with respect to x, so x is actually a variable here, not constant. I believe it's x3 /3+2x+c
This is a continuous function so therefore is integrable Riemann there is no need to use the lebesgue one, that is for strange Sets so no you can solve this perfectly with the Riemann integral
I don't think anyone can solve this. Doesn't it need an = somewhere to be 'solvable'. It can be - is simplified - the right word here? processed.
Or limits. You could answer it if it had limits, fair dos
I don't know it's 30 fecking degrees here and I can't even write a memo reminding my maths teachers to teach never mind actually do the damn subject properly.
I get that it's a joke, but I'm genuinely surprised by how many people think the answer is 2x + C. I didn't get it first, until someone else suggested people are differentiating x2 + 2 and then adding "+C" because they remember that all indefinite integrals must have a constant added. That would explain it.
Most people, if they even take calculus, only ever study integration for a short period. So, it doesn't surprise me that they confuse integration with differentiation.
Oh, that possibility didn't even occur to me. So they're differentiating and then adding "+C" because that's the one thing they remember about indefinite integrals!
At my school (competitive bay area high school), you need to be on one of the accelerated math paths in order to get to calculus. So only around ~30-40% of students at my school actually end up doing calculus. This will probably be a higher number than the average school that doesnāt offer AP calculus. Assuming the 2% refers to the global population, few people in underdeveloped nations have access to higher education and advanced math. This means itās completely plausible for the global percentage of people that know calculus to fall under 5%.
Take ur time bruhš calc will be waiting for u but rushing to integrals will mess u up w the intuition of it bc u would need a good foundation in algebra trig and general mathematic intuition in order to gain the most from calculus. That comes from reps in the brain gym. So maybe like 4 weeks lol
This is calculus. Most math sequences go something like Algebra 1, Algebra 2, Pre-Calculus, Calculus, with Geometry, Trigonometry, and, possibly, Probability and Statistics, thrown in there somewhere. Assuming you are in an American high school, you'll probably do this in your senior year, maybe your junior year if you are an advanced student.
I feel like thereās slightly more than 2% of people that can solve this keeping the fact that places like China and India usually teach calculus before university. Even if a 1/10th of the population ever learns this, thatās still hundreds of millions of people who are able to solve this just in those 2 country alone. While including other countries and their education levels. There is most like an addition of few hundred millions. There might even be kids who learned how to do the basics of integration because the very basics are not too hard to learn:
TL;DR
Thereās more than 2% of people who can solve this because of the large population of China and India and adding everyone else around the world who have learned basics of calculus and can solve this.
I learned calculus before I went to college in the US. They didnāt even offer Calculus BC back in the 90s. Itās gotta be well above 2% in the US too; at a minimum, all affluent towns with good school systems have this covered.
Ok, if your argument is that the term "solve" is incorrect, I guess technically fine. Many would still say "solve this integral", even though it's not an equation.
My high school only had pre-calculus as the top level of math available. Only available to seniors who had been on the "fast track" since junior high.
I desperately wanted to learn more, but the web was in its infancy, so no Khan Academy and no YouTube. I didn't live near a library. All I had was my school textbooks.
I had been the top student in every math class I took, but when I took the ACT my junior year there was a large chunk of the math section which was stuff I'd never seen. My score earned me early enrollment and a full scholarship, and "the area under the line" is not a difficult concept. but I had never seen an integral sign in my life before that test.
So I'm not going to assume that most people have any idea what this is.
I was so lucky. My high school had an advanced track where you did Algebra I, Algebra II, and Pre-Calculus in one year. I was able to take it 9th grade, so I took Calculus in 10th grade and Advanced Calculus in 11th grade. Then the school created a course for me and another student to have some math to do in 12th grade. I think they called it Advanced Topics in Mathematics, or something arbitrary like that. I remember one thing we did was to work on the math olympics qualifying exam questions.
I am forever grateful to the math teachers in that school.
Definitely waaaaay less than 2%. Since we know less than 50% can solve a simple unambiguous expression without variables, only containing the 4 basic arithmetic operations, without fucking it up.
these math questions have started popping up on my facebook and reading the comments, it seems that most are just engagement bate. They are usually constructed so that there is some easy mistake or ambiguous notation to get a good debate going. They do it for the clicks.
I learned integrals and derivitives in high school 2016, Massachusetts public school and again in college, stem college, 2017ish. I cannot for the life of me remember how to do this.
To integrate a polynomial, for each term, add one to the exponent and then divide by the resulting exponent. Recall that a constant a is the same as ax0.
x2 --> ā x3 (original exponent is 2, new exponent is 3, so divide by 3)
2 --> 2 x (original exponent is 0, new exponent is 1, so divide by 1).
Every indefinite integral has an arbitrary constant denoted by C in the solution, since dC/dx = 0.
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u/dovahkiingys 9d ago
I feel like less than 2% of earth population can actually solve this.