My trigonometry instructors in junior high and high school were certainly correct that I'd need to know trig later in life. They just couldn't explain why in any way that made sense at the time.
My first real-world need to have more than a trivial level of understanding of trig was when I consulted on firmware for tilt-compensated compass modules in the mid to late 1990s.
I did that kind of stuff again in the oughts and teens, and on those gigs, learned use of quaternions for 3D rotation.
@brouhaha I remember asking my high school calc teacher when would I ever use it. Did not get a satisfactory answer. Ended up going to grad school for physics, so yeah, I would use calc a wee bit. I guess the joke was on me.
@ezwal @brouhaha I had a 20-year gap between high school pre-calc and college calculus classes. Which made things tough. Add to that I had two quarters of P Chem (which required some calculus) before I took my calculus course. I had to cut back to 40-hours at work during my senior year in college because, for the first time, I really had to study. BTW: fortunately, I have not had to use Calc since graduation, good thing because I probably couldn't.
