Comment by acjohnson55
4 years ago
You need algebra and calculations calculus to do anything theoretical in probability. But I'm a fan of working backwards from interesting applications of algebra to the fundamentals.
4 years ago
You need algebra and calculations calculus to do anything theoretical in probability. But I'm a fan of working backwards from interesting applications of algebra to the fundamentals.
True, but hardly anyone does anything theoretical. Those who do will probably have taken a lot of extra math courses along the way. IMNSHO, you need to understand the principles of algebra and calculus, but you don't have to know how to integrate by parts, or know the formula for computing the roots of a quadratic. Statistics, otoh, is fundamental to understanding science, voting (I'm thinking of Trump's claim that it was statistically impossible for him to have lost), health, the meaning of bad test results (here I'm thinking of Bayes' Theorem--and minimal algebra is needed to solve that equation), and so forth.