More than the quantum of the expense, I am questioning the need. Couple of hundred dollars on an unnecessary expense is still wastage.

But for Calculus (part of CS) you need a graphing calculator.

You don’t, unless the teaching staff decide to include a lot of numerical work in exams. Which I don’t know why they would do. I would presume that a calculus course would teach you algebraic methods that you work out on paper.

In Swedish engineering schools, graphing calculators are banned from exams in almost all subject.

Why? I've done calculus and analysis in college and no one has ever used a calculator, I'm not even sure what you would need one for, can you give me an example (seriously curious)

The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education was some circuit theory because those Thevenins and Nortons get real ugly real fast (but even then you only need +,-,*,/)

This is not calculus specific, but how did you look up logarithms? With printed tables??

The same way as pi, e and other constants, log(17) is just that. I never had to convert them to some decimal approximation in calculus classes

Edit: Ok, I remember now there was a statistics exam when we had something like Student's t-distribution tabulated on the exam sheet but I had to scrape my brain to find an example, it does happen though

> The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education

I’m not asking about calculus classes. You specifically said “my entire education”

So you never needed to convert log(17) to decimal in your entire education? Or you just converted it by hand like the Neanderthals did?

Not on a piece of paper, no.

Of course I had to at some point but in those instances I was at a computer anyway so I just used excel/python/matlab what have you, not a calculator like a Neanderthal

You don't need a 100+£ programmable calculator for calculating log(17).

He didn't mention 100+£ or any price. He said he never used a calculator in college -- even a 5£ calculator.

Why? Calculus is primarily used and taught analytically in maths & cs courses in my country.