This includes topics that are no longer covered in calc classes, but used to be. Mostly they're no longer relevant -- or rather, they're cute but not useful. ---------------------------------------- This draws heavily from: Steven Krantz's "How to teach mathematics", p.256 (Uhl's appendix) ---------------------------------------- In particular, things we've seen dropped are: - (manual) numerical methods Before calculators, people needed to do calculations by hand, so a proficiency with complicated manipulations was important. This is an area where calculators have really replaced knowing math. [That is, many of these computations had no intrinsic value; they are -just- techniques/algorithms, w/o much deeper meaning.] [A similar point in elementary math is that we don't teach ``casting out 9s'' to check sums. We actually should: it's not a valuable computational skill, but there's important math behind it, namely modular arithmetic.] I'd argue that symbolic calculus systems have done the same for the trig reduction formulae in integration. Note also that what computations we -still- do need justification: - simple computations, like adding with carrying and subtracting with borrowing, are useful for small quantities, like calculating change or estimating small sums - multiplication and long division are not useful -per se-, but b/c of their deeper meaning: long division -> the euclidean algorithm and polynomial division Long multiplication? well, kinda similarly! Today, -some- knowledge of numerical issues matter, especially: - stability ...and how many digits of accuracy one can get - problem cases EG, when a function has derivative 0 or infinity, many formulae don't work very well. (EG, computing arc-cosine for values close to 0) - elementary real algebraic geometry EG: - detailed study of conics - special (often algebraic) plane curves - Descarte's rule of signs This has disappeared for 3 main reasons: - more general functions for many applications, general smooth (or analytic, or continuous) functions are just as useful as real polynomials, if not more so. - complex numbers Much algebra gets -much- clearer over the complex numbers; if you respect them and like them (which you should), there's not much general value in studying real polynomials, though they do have some nice (but not terribly useful) properties - less astronomy Astronomers love conics. Note that the lessening importance of astronomy lead to both less study of conics and less study of spherical geometry.