what are some real-world applications of calculus besides architecture?

Answer 1

I study forensic science, and forensic ballistic analysis and blood stain pattern analysis are both based heavily around physics, which is based heavily on calculus.

Answer 2

Calculus is worthless unless you want a decent job.

Now, while it's the basis of just about everything we know in the physical sciences, I find that a lot of people over-use calculus when they don't fully understand the physical phenomena behind what they're doing. They lean on math when many answers can be solved by making better assumptions or using common sense.

I find analytical calculus to be a pain. Numerical calculus is where things are going, but you'll never fully understand it until you pay your dues and go through the elementary analytical stuff.

Trust me... the concepts of a derivative and of an integral come up everywhere, even in unlikely places like business.

Answer 3

So far everyone's answers are decent. What can you do with Calculus? Calculus is math that describes nature. It can describe fluid flow, heat transfer, air flow, how an airplane flies, how a rocket flies and therefore how to control it, how much force a marble has when it hits the ground after you've dropped it from a 10 story building....in short, the answer is every technical field out there that's worth a darn uses calculus.

Answer 4

With regular math you can determine the length of a buried cable that runs diagonally from one corner of a park to the other. With calculus you can determine the length of a cable hung between two towers that has the shape of a catenary (which is different, by the way, from a simple circular arc or a parabola). Knowing the exact length is of obvious importance to a power company planning hundreds of miles of new electric cable.

With regular math and some simple physics, you can calculate by how much a quarterback must lead his receiver to complete a pass. Note that the receiver runs in a straight line and at a constant speed. But when NASA, in 1975, calculated the necessary “lead” for aiming the Viking I at Mars, it needed calculus because both the Earth and Mars travel on elliptical orbits (of different shapes) and the speeds of both are constantly changing — not to mention the fact that on its way to Mars, the spacecraft is affected by the different and constantly changing gravitational pulls of the Earth, the moon, Mars, and the sun.

Answer 5

Medicine - calculus is used to model the clearance rate of drugs in the body

Electro-optics - calculus is used to model the ability of the eye to discern targets from backgrounds

Physics - why calculus was invented

Ballistics - calculus is used to model the complex drag equations for projectiles

Business - calculus is used to model markets, option pricing, efficient frontiers

Actually, I don't know that calculus is used in architecture, per se. Should be used in civil and structural engineering.

Answer 6

Engineering relies heavily on calculus. A typical example is optimization. One might have several equations of several variables and in order to optimize a process, you could take partial derivatives of all the equations and set them simultaneously to zero. (The idea being that the extrema have zero slope).

Answer 7

tragectories of planets(i think thats why newton invented it), spacecraft, baseballs or anything, and all of physics which is everything... and a billion other things i havent learned yet.