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[Garth Wilson]

Although computers have dramatically sped up the processing in recent decades, the math itself was has not really advanced. It was already understood. High-school students did better in math before there were calculators.

Our sons were supposed to get TI graphing calculators for their high-school math classes. The older one just used my old TI-59 (which came out in 1977 or '78) and did fine. He said the only thing the students used their graphing calcs for was playing games anyway. Three years later, my wife caved in and bought our younger son the required graphing calc, and he never really used it for graphing, and aced the classes anyway.

A college student asked me about things like FTTs and convolution integrals, trying to get past the ultra-sterile theory they get in school and to get a practical understanding of what they do; so I explained them, in English, and showed him things I was doing in my work, doing these with thousands of points. He didn't understand why, because in school they were only doing very few points (like eight), just enough to do the function. The reason of course was that in a math class you won't have instrumentation collecting thousands of data points super quickly and inputting them to a computer, and you don't need it anyway to do the math. It's a math class.