Re: Movin' On

Daniel Hogg wrote:
"Lizzardwoman" <lizzardwomanRMOVE@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:55tra5F25jkucU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"John Hasler" <john@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:87r6rqfch2.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
| sharon writes:
| > You didn't need calculus for any of your MBA courses?
|
| What use would MBAs have for calculus? The nearest they get to math is
| twiddling the knobs on Excel.

I don't know. I thought maybe some of the advanced economics courses might.

Hold the phone! My husband just called, thought about, and said none was
required.

Microeconomics requires calculus IME, else it's fluff. This isn't calculus for the sake and beauty of the mathematics, but to understand how things work - e.g. a curve where demand is a function of price. Where'd your hub go to school? I was a TA in grad school and it was a required course.

You don't need calculus for finance or accounting or organizational dev, but it is useful for pricing models, which include product and labor pricing. A Good Thing if one wants to stay in business.



I'm currently taking the required econ for St. Thomas' MBA (my last course). The book will show (in the appendix) the hard math used for the functions (i.e., calculus), but the prof is spending much more time on the graphs/curves, showing where things intersect in order to make management decisions (production functions, demand functions, etc...). For management, it's more important to understand the implication of the functions, rather than the math behind how it's derived. I'm sure if I took more advanced econ courses, or ones where the goal was understanding the math behind econ, there would be MUCH more calculus. However, St. Thomas' MBA is more concerned with what it MEANS, and how to use tools (like Excel's "solver" add-in) to make good decisions rather than understand the math behind the theory.

My prof loves his graphs, though... And they are useful to understand WHY.

No other courses had calculus (except in the appendix). The heaviest math courses were financial accounting, managerial accounting, and statistics. I had to use my calculator, and remember my algebra from 1979:)

Robin
.

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