Calculus
I was in eighth grade in Geometry. I did Algebra as a class the year before, and was fascinated with the concepts of slope. In Geometry we learned about tangent lines one day.
That night I had the realization that the tangent line to a figure was really just the slope of a figure, or its derivative. I didn't know that word yet, but I got the concept of derivation. I didn't really know how to calculate the tangent line’s slope, but I had a graphing calculator. I took a ordinary curve (I think it was [math]x^2 [/math]or something) and found the values of x = 1 and x = 1.001, then approximated the tangent line to have a slope of about 2. I did it again for x = 2 and found the slope to be about 4. I figured out that the slope was always about 2x and just figured that is what it was because of my error. I got curious and did it for [math]x^3[/math] and found the tangent lines slope was always 3x^2. I figured that was an obvious enough pattern and just made it the rule, the tangent lines slope is always the exponent times x, to the power of the exponent minus 1.
I told my math teacher Mr. Alexander hoping that I could maybe publish my ‘new discovery’ and go to college early and get on the news and be super famous, but he told me it was already known and was called calculus. I wasn't that happy haha
When I got to Calculus class in high school I had pretty much already figured out calculus for about the first quarter of the way through. Integration was a major epiphany for me!
Now I'm in my senior year of high school and wanting to make a career in physics, so I'm pretty happy that I had an early start in math :)
Read other answers by Noah Smith on Quora:
- How can you stop caring about someone who doesn't care about you?
- What if everything was infinite for humanity to use? Life, resources, energy, etc.?
from Quora http://ift.tt/2eLGVSL
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