Advanced Math

Once, a really great computer science student found himself struggling through calculus classes. It surprised him greatly, as he could easily write a program to do the homework for him, but he could not complete it himself. Thus, his poor test scores reflected his true weakness in the area he considered "advanced math."

He went to his calculus professor and explained the situation.

"You see, sir, with computers, the idea is to figure out how to write a program to perform a process on some data and produce some kind of desired output. With calculus, it's different. You are given a lot of different processes to solve the problems, but the trouble is figuring out which ones to use on a given problem, rather than writing a program to perform those processes. Thus, I'm excellent at programming, but terrible at this advanced math."

The professor replied, "First of all, this isn't advanced math..."