Dopers in biological science or medical fields, have you ever used calculus?

In My Humble Opinion
1

What I want to know from you guys is based on your experiences, is it likely that I’ll ever need calculus as a lab worker?

Here’s the issue:

My degree requirements do not specifically require calculus. I had to take 2 quantitative classes and I have done so (stats and precalculus).

People keep telling me I HAVE to take calculus. I think they are telling me this because it is assumed that most people in my major are going to continue on to vet or medical school. I am not. If I do decide to apply to a grad program, the only one I’d apply to requires only one semester of math (which I have) and no GRE. There are science requirements and I’ll have those covered easily.

I still have to take general and organic chemistry but neither of them require calculus. I do not have to take physics (which does require it).
So, I don’t want to be a medical, veterinary, or research doctor. I don’t even want to be a manager. I want to work in a lab environment. I just want to do a job, preferably a gooey one.
Basically, if it’s unlikely that I’ll ever need calculus, I’d rather spend the time and money on other subjects. There are so many science classes I want to take and there’s just not enough time!

But if you think that calculus has been invaluable to you, I want to know so I don’t make a huge mistake by not taking it.

Just in case anyone thinks I’m focusing too much on science - I already have my AA in Liberal Arts. Gotta have a well-rounded education!

2

No, not calculus.

But I do use statistics on a regular basis.

3

I am strongly considering taking Stats again because I don’t remember much from my community college stats class and as much as I hated it, I know it would be very valuable.

4

While learning statistics, make sure you learn marketable programming language. R right now is the “thing” and it’s fairly easy to learn, if you’ve got some self-initiative. You can’t go wrong with SAS or SPSS, though.

I don’t know what kind of lab work you’re talking about, but the rule of thumb is that statistics becomes more important the higher in biological organizational structure you go. Your average field ecologist is going to know more advanced statistics than your average cellular biologist, just because of the differences in the variability they work with.

5

why care about what “people” are telling you. Go with your degree requirements. Dentist here. never took calculus therefore never use, never needed it either. Took two semesters of physics, needed trig. and algebra for that not calc.

6

As I recall from when I studied biochemistry (a long time ago) there was calculus involved in understanding the results of analytical ultracentrifugation. It is also involved in understanding reaction rates and changes of those rates. Really, the way biochemical processes pan out depends on the differing rates of different reactions under various, and sometimes continuously changing, conditions. Although quite a lot of biochem theory can be understood at a purely qualitative level (and that is the only aspect of it I really remember now) a detailed and quantitative understanding requires getting into those reaction rates, and for that you need calculus.

Frankly, I doubt whether doctors or vets very often do need calculus, but you will need it for some (not all) sorts of lab work.

7

I’m a physicist, not a biologist, so what I say may not be relevant. I was surprised to find that some pengineering friends of mine don’t use calculus. I know I certainly do.

At MIT everyone is required to pass two semesters of calculs – even if you end up majoring in the Humanities. In adition, the standard physics courses for biomed students, 8.013 and 8.023, use calculus (in my day they used Benedek and villars as a text – physics with ilustrative Examples from Medicine and Biology. I don’t know what they use today.

I can easily see someone working in experimental biology, dealing with rate equations or somesuch and using differential equations, for which alculs is essential. Or someone working in biomechanics (which I dabbled in) needing it.

8

I gave up algebra when I learned dimensional analysis for medication calculations. Never made it to calculus. Never needed to.

(I would like to take stats again, though. It’s been too long, and it really would be useful if I could make heads or tails of data, rather than relying on reading the Conclusions section of studies and taking their word for it.)

WhyNot, RN

9

As a general rule, no. There are very an extremely limited number of specialized fields where calculus is needed but not for the vast majority of them including most of the STEM sub disciplines. I went to grad school in behavioral neorocience and now work in IT and have never seen it used in those although it is for some specialized software applications.

It makes me wonder why it became a default college requirement for all students. Statistics is vastly more useful in the working world and greatly underemphasized IMHO. Learn statistics and take it as an elective at the upper levels if you can because it is about the most useful course you can have.

Still, if calculus is a requirement, just grit your teeth and do the best you can possibly do at it. Math classes like that serve as a proxy IQ test later.for admission to things like grad school.

10

rsat3acr - one of the “people” is my adviser. I think he is concerned that I’ll change my mind and not be accepted to a good medical school without it. I’m definitely not changing my mind.
monstro - the type of lab I’m gravitating toward is of the medical diagnostic variety - fluids, tissues, centrifuges - that kind of stuff. I don’t think that this type of work will involve nearly as much statistics as field ecology. But, like WhyNot said, it certainly makes understanding studies easier.
Shagnasty - I agree that stats is more useful in the working world. Calculus isn’t a requirement but my adviser thinks I should take it and everyone in my major that I’ve talked to is taking it and thinks it’s oh-so-important. I just want to make sure I wont be doing myself a disservice before I drop it from my educational plans.

11

Had to do a unit of calculus as a pre-requisite for Biometry at uni. Never used it in the Biometry course and certainly never used it since. Use trig, stats and geometry constantly, but not calculus.

However i wouldn’t say that calculus is utterly worthless. I have used analytical packages where an understanding of the *concepts *of calculus were important. I have needed to at least understand rates of change, the theory behind area under the curve and so forth in order to be able to select the correct analysis to run.

But provided you have enough theoretical knowledge to be able to select the right tests, the actual calculus is all done by machines. I’m sure you could acquire the theoretical knowledge neded without ever doing the practical part of calculus: I can’t even remember where to *start *working on a calculus problem any more. But I can’t think where you would learn it outside of a calculus course.

12

lab work can involve calculus. lots of different results involve the use of derivatives or integrals.

13

Yes. In grad school I needed to integrate under curves, which were traces that were collected from an NMR. I had to find the area.

14

No, I have never used calculus In Real Life, but it was necessary to understand a lot of other concepts.

15

Associate of Science (2-year A.S.) degree here, Math major, so I have a bit of bias here.

I agree with much of the above, in particular:
– Yes, Stat is a Must in Any Field of Science these days, including “Soft Sciences”.
– You may find a bit of calculus sporadically useful here and there, but you will never likely really “need” it.
– That said, though, I agree that a little calculus knowledge will really help you to understand how Life, The Universe, And Everything really works. Rates of fluid flow across a membrane. Rates of heat flow across boundaries. Interest rates, like if your investment account is compounded “continuously”. Anywhere there is a “rate” of anything, you will understand what is going on, with calculus, in a way that you never did before. You may get your formulas right out of the books, but you will then have an idea what is “really” going on with them.

njtt: “It is also involved in understanding reaction rates and changes of those rates. Really, the way biochemical processes pan out depends on the differing rates of different reactions under various, and sometimes continuously changing, conditions.”

Blake: “However i wouldn’t say that calculus is utterly worthless. I have used analytical packages where an understanding of the concepts of calculus were important. I have needed to at least understand rates of change, the theory behind area under the curve and so forth in order to be able to select the correct analysis to run.”

johnpost: "lab work can involve calculus. lots of different results involve the use of derivatives or integrals. "

IvoryTowerDenizen: "Yes. In grad school I needed to integrate under curves, which were traces that were collected from an NMR. I had to find the area. "

My anecdote: I worked as a low-level assistant with a dolphin research project once. They did field studies of humpback whales too. They took sightings of whales in various bays in the Pacific Northwest, and sightings of vessels. With all those coordinates (including the time of each sighting), we wanted to answer this question: What was the closest distance that any whale came to whatever vessel was nearby? Of course, we would have a computer program to take that data and do the actual computations.

My job was to design and write that computer program.

I didn’t know calculus at the time, except for tidbits I had picked up. But I saw here a minimization problem, where you want to find the smallest value that occurs. (Smallest, here, meaning find the smallest distance.) And I knew that calculus concerns itself with solving just such problems.

So I enrolled in the local community college and took the first semester calculus class. At the end of the class, I knew how to solve that problem.

Did it really require calculus? Turns out, it didn’t. The necessary formula (which I had to develop myself) turned out, after much algebraic wrangling, to be the equation of a simple parabola – which any one-year algebra student can minimize. But I needed that semester of calculus to understand the problem to begin with and to know how to develop that formula from the kind of data we had. Only after doing all that, did it then turn out to be fairly simple after all.

16

Oh, and another thing: If you’re serious, take the full 3-semester Calculus sequence AND Differential Equations. You’ll find that “gooey” to your heart’s content!

[sub]ETA: But Statistics can serve this purpose too.[/sub]

17

Agreed with the above posts. I’m in grad school right now for biophysics, but my current work is mostly in molecular biology. I don’t use calculus in my day to day work (yet, until I start working on the theoretical part of the lab goals). However, understanding calculus has made it easier for me to understand how the physical world works, and I think that has made me a better thinker and scientist. I also think it’s part of the reason I got into grad school in the first place. I’d recommend at least multivariate; it’s good to learn how to think in 3D.

OTOH, I think statistics is much more practically useful in the biosciences and it’s something I wish I had taken more of in undergrad.

18

Ph.D. in Biology. The only class I ever failed was Calculus I. I re-took an easy version of calc and got a B. Then I took Calc II and got a D.

I’ve never, ever, used calculus in my career, but I’m a field biologist/ecologist. It might be different for a lab biologist.

19

But, to whatever extent you understood any of that Calculus stuff, did it help you at least to understand the workings of Life, the Universe, and Everything? For example, did it help you to have a better understanding of the Logistics Curve?

20

I was worried when asking the question that you were all going to tell me what you’re telling me. :smiley:

Looks like a have a bigger decision to make than I thought.