You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Open thread, January 25- February 1 - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: NancyLebovitz 25 January 2014 02:52PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (316)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 27 January 2014 07:25:49PM *  7 points [-]

Not much. The kind of probability relevant to MIRI's interests is not the kind of probability you need calculus to understand (the random variables are usually discrete, etc.). The closest thing to needing a calculus background is maybe numerical analysis (I suspect it would be helpful to at least have the intuition that derivatives measure the sensitivity of a function to changes in its input), but even then I think that's more algorithms. Not an expert on numerical analysis by any means, though.

If you have a general interest in mathematics, I still recommend that you learn some calculus because it's an important foundation for other parts of mathematics and because people, when explaining things to you, will often assume that you know calculus after a certain point and use that as a jumping-off point.

Comment author: TylerJay 27 January 2014 08:02:19PM 1 point [-]

Thanks. I took single variable calculus, differential equations, and linear algebra in college, but its been four years since then and I haven't really used any of it since (and I think I really only learned it in context, not deeply). I've just been trying to figure out how much of my math foundations i'm going to need to re-learn.

This was helpful.