Calculus was the starting point for his thinking, but it is the most doubtful item on the list. He said he thought about adding Writing. To keep it to five, I'd replace Programming with Writing. If you can Write well, shouldn't you be able to Program well too? The skill in programming is in writing down precise, concise, and efficient directions, after all. And Calculus needs comment. Just learning to take derivatives and integrals is not important to a liberal education, except perhaps as an ancillary to economics and physics. Statistics is far more important. But what is truly important is Marginalism, the idea of Maximization and Making Tradeoffs. This, with the Invisible Hand, is one of the two most important ideas in economics, and it runs all through Physics, Law, Business, Medicine, and Engineering too. Calculus is intimately tied in to Marginalism, so if we consider the two as one idea to learn, I concur with Professor Cowen.1. Calculus
2. Statistics
3. Programming
4. Shakespeare
5. The Bible
The other item that might be changed is Shakespeare. But there's no other author I'd put in his place.
Charles Murray's 2003 book, Human Accomplishment, would be a good reference for this subject.
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