If we need calculus for CS, I wish we'd teach it under the CS heading so that exposure to math didn't have to be so biased towards real analysis. Students spend years achieving this arbitrary (unless you're going to be an engineer) goal and end up with the erroneous (and often harmful) intuition that all spaces are continuous metric spaces.
I don't get this take at all--learn both real analysis and discrete math. At MIT especially. Knowing calculus (the precursor to RA) is essential for quantitatively understanding the world in which we live, including the 99.9% of it that is not computer science.
I think we're in a circle: I'm objecting that we teach people to map everything onto the real line and you're saying that it's essential to quantitatively understanding the world. But isn't that what "quantitatively" means?
My point is that in the zoo of mathematics, the reals are just one exhibit. Equally valid is to map phenomena onto topological spaces, inner product spaces, sets, groups, rings, fields, lattices, topoi, etc... People have been standing on Newton's shoulders for so long that all they can see from there is ground well worn by their colleagues who stood on the same shoulders.
I think we'd be much better off if you had to specialize in some part of math, but that different people specialized in different parts of it without necessarily taking a major in it. This would maximize the sort of happy accidents that lead to discovery because for any given phenomena you now have a wider variety of perspectives on it, rather than just a classroom full of analysts.
I'm against the reals in particular because I think they're especially suited to zero sum games, and I wish we played fewer of those.
I could agree with this. The one regret I had was burning through all my math classes within my first two years while my early CS classes barely seemed to use Algebra to begin with.
Then lo and behold, turns out I like computer graphics a few years later, and all that linear algebra and multivariable calculus I skimmed through slams me back in the face as I find out that GPUS chew through such math for breakfast. I could never find the application of such math to my career track until long after I took those classes.
