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I don't have a CS degree, but even in entry level positions, it crops up when you least expect it. My company gathers data off of truck engines, with a data sample every .3 seconds. The data samples contain things like instantaneous "fuel rate," "vehicle speed" and other "rate" values. If the manager says to me "erroneousfunk, I want the cumulative fuel usage values over time, in a graph" I need to know that they're looking for the second derivative of the fuel rate, and how to model and summarize that data in the database appropriately for a fast processing and lookups across any combination of companies/drivers/trucks/date ranges they can think of.

Voila! Calculus, algorithms, and data modeling!

Or perhaps I need a job title upgrade :-p



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