Post Reply 
Why do French communities seem always a bit ahead in the sector of modern calcs?
09-15-2017, 09:01 PM (This post was last modified: 09-15-2017 09:10 PM by debrouxl.)
Post: #5
RE: Why do French communities seem always a bit ahead in the sector of modern calcs?
Yeah, the non-university elite "classes préparatoires" system, known in everyday language as "prépa(s)", is good for teaching lots of pure, advanced maths on a very high-volume schedule.
It proves to be a first step towards fundamental research in mathematics. IIRC, people working in France (including foreigners) are consistently publishing >5% of fundamental math research papers, whereas France only houses a bit less than 1% of the world's inhabitants.
However, let's face it, apart from university / prépa math teachers and math researchers, a crushing majority of the math content taught in prépa is basically useless for... nearly any kind of day job, nearly all the time, even in fields such as computer science, where most engineers don't do math anymore to begin with, and even the more mathematically-oriented jobs, such as data scientist positions, use applied math (more in the area of statistics and probability theory) Smile
Back in the day, I got a fair sample of prépa math content through books suitable for such classes, following several special lessons taught by one of our high school math teacher to a subset of students who would enter such classes, or at least math / CS+math classes at university. Interesting, but... wow.

The NumWorks calculator doesn't have a CAS because its software is early beta and they focused on other things, and anyway, its hardware is much too weak for containing the full-blown port of giac which Bernard Parisse made work on the computer-based NumWorks calculator workalike which does not implement the real calculator model's memory limits. There's some room for improvement, though.
Find all posts by this user
Quote this message in a reply
Post Reply 


Messages In This Thread
RE: Why do French communities seem always a bit ahead in the sector of modern calcs? - debrouxl - 09-15-2017 09:01 PM



User(s) browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)