Why the heck do students need to take so much stinken math to get a business degree?
When do business people ever use Calculus these days?
mik -
We’ve discussed this one before. Check out the thread below for some answers.
As a matter of interest, I saw a book yesterday, I didn’t catch the author – some statistics professor at Univ of Edinborough, I think. Anyway, it’s about statistics and law.
Frinstance, an individual breaks a window to burglarize a house, struggles with the owner and both bleed, flees with the silver. A suspect is caught. The blood type of the homeowner is found on the suspect’s clothing; it’s a common type, about 35% of the population has that type. The blood type on the carpet is the same as the suspect, a rare type (only 10% of the population.) The shards of glass in the victims’s elbow are a 90% probable match to the window. Etc etc. You have a string of probabilities; what’s the degree of certainty that your suspect is guilty?
There are examples of the prosecutors and defense attorneys and the judges making dramatic errors in interpreting statistical probability. That’s why you need math.
I also think that the analytical skills used in higher math help you in the business world. Even if you don’t use the math, the problem solving skills you develop will help out.
There will come a point where you will need to be able to read a spread sheet. And you will have to have a “feel” for the numbers you see.
Experence tells you what you need to see.
A math background gives you the language to explain it to the people who don’t see it.
[Deleted to avoid a zombification of a thread - just realised how old this one was]
It looks like all posters from before the year 2000 have been assimilated.
You are mistaken. There are no posters before 2000. I repeat. THERE ARE NO POSTERS BEFORE THE YEAR 2000.
I think Riemann needs… re-education. ::sinister glare::
A lot of engineering jobs require very little math, too.
Many industries want their employees to have taken math classes. Not because the jobs necessarily require math. But because (they believe) it demonstrates logic, reason, and discipline.
It didn’t work. 
Actually, math – even the dreaded calculus – does turn up in business situations.
I took a class in Economics once. – Just in introductory class, the kind you’d take to meet a breadth requirement. I remember very little of it, but I do remember this:
I was the only one in the class, I think, with some calculus background. Everyone else only knew some algebra, and most of them barely even that.
So there were all the economic things, details like price/demand curves, “velocity of money” graphs, and all kinds of mathematical ideas. All presented in a very basic “dummies” kind of way.
But there were two graphs of two economic phenomena – I have utterly no recollection what they were – but I immediately recognized that one of them was the first derivative of the other.
The textbook certainly didn’t point out any such details, and I don’t imagine anyone else in the class (and probably not even the teacher) ever noticed it.
So a little math, beyond algebra, can help one to understand how various economic ideas connect up with one another.
You can’t understand statistics without calculus. Sure, you don’t necessarily need to memorize your integration tables (not that you need to anyway), but you should know what it means to integrate over a function (like a probability distribution function).
That’s true, but as an engineer you have to know the math to understand what you’re working with. And I think that’s true for economists as well.
Business majors need a math class that they call calculus. It’s extremely dumbed down compared to the calculus taken by engineers. Or compared to the calculus taken by high schoolers, for that matter.
Old as this thread is, Merton and Scholes already got their Nobel Memorial Prize by 1997, and despite the stereotype that economists can barely apply linear regression, as far as I can tell businesses have been engaging in all sorts of quantitative mathematical modelling since long before then anyway, even if you point out that this or that individual successful businessman barely passed “business calculus”.
It seems relevant to point out that businesses have adopted rigorous methods like double-entry bookkeeping for many centuries, for a reason. [Not saying that basic accounting requires quantum stochastic calculus, but am suggesting that what works, works even when mathematics is involved. There have been huge efforts, not necessarily to prop up businesses or capitalism, but by “social scientists” to adopt analytical methods that in the past might have belonged more to high-energy experimental physics.]
My economics degree required courses in both calculus and statistics. Not easy ones. You simply cannot do economics without it, and you aren’t getting into a decent grad program without a solid base of mathematics.
This link is broken, but I was curious what other thread it was a link to. I think it must have been this one: