<p>I'll be entering some math class in the fall as a freshman. Will my trusty TI-83 do the job, or will I be needing a different calculator?</p>
<p>Yes. TI-83 pretty much can get everybody (who knows how and when to use it) through college. It was designed for college students.</p>
<p>When I asked this same question a few months ago, everyone told me I was crazy for thinking my calculator would have a use at UChicago. So it will probably be fine. From what I’ve been told, the calculus classes don’t use calculators. A TI-83 will be fine. I think. But this is secondhand information, so you shouldn’t be 100% certain that it is correct.</p>
<p>You won’t need a calculator. Trust me.</p>
<p>Calculators was not used last year in math class. This is because no numbers were used, either.</p>
<p>Care to explain?</p>
<p>Proofs, baby. Get to analysis and 160s Honors Calc (maybe 150s also), and it’s not about the numbers any more.</p>
<p>aaawhaaaaaaaaaaa</p>
<p>Math at Chicago is not about calculation. A TI-83 will be fine, because nothing would probably also be fine, and everyone would agree that a TI-83 is a lot better than nothing.</p>
<p>Proofs? Oh dear god…</p>
<p>How about chemistry, economics, stuff like that? I know my kids didn’t use calculators in math, but it occurs to me that I have no idea whether they were useful in other courses. No one ever asked for a new calculator (I’m not certain what calculators they had, but they were one or another version of hot-stuff high school math student calculator), but then no one took any seriously math-based social or hard science course yet, either.</p>
<p>Calculators are pretty useful for chemistry I would imagine. From what I’ve heard, gen chem is far more difficult than AP Chem, but I think calculators are quite useful for computations.</p>
<p>For econ, I don’t think the elements of economic analysis sequence requires heavy calculator usage. The psets in Econ 200 always involved multivariate optimization and quasi-rigorous proofs (and a lot of algebra), but hardly any numerical computations. The final exam for my section included some basic computations that were evident to me, but perhaps unfamiliar to those who had forgotten how to estimate which integers a square root of a real number is between.</p>
<p>Note that you can get mathematica on your computer at no extra cost, so that may help with certain computations.</p>