Re: Chemistry with calculus???

Uncle Al wrote:

Chemistry has five primary divisions: Organic, inorganic, analytical,
physical, theoretical. The first two are founded upon compiled
observation, the third is statistical.

Only a part of thermodynamics, or other areas of P-chem, is statistical. The laws of thermodynamics were worked out, based on observations, before statistics was much developed.

You will not see mathematical
modeling until rather late on. Physical and theoretical are deeply
math-based at the onset. Note that nobody yet has a richly predictive
theoretical model of water, H2O - and not for want of trying.

The first use I had of calculus was in graduate school, when I was taught how to derive some some equations by applying calculus to a smaller number of basic equations. I should have figutred it out for myself, but i didn't.

The spectroscopies and spectrometries originate in physics.

Give some credit to chemists. Bunsen was a chemist. But much of analytical chemistry has become physics since ca. 1950.When I was in the Analytical Chemistry Division of the U.S. National Bureau of Standards, I realized that the professional staff was about half chemists and half physicists, and we learned from each other.

However,
the world is a dirty complex place. Elegant rigorous theory often
takes a back seat to practical semi-empirical interpretation. Example: Look at an IR of wax depilatory and adjuncts,

"Looks like vegetable oil with an isopropyl group."

In the early days of operation research, during WW II, it was found that chemists did better at it than did physicists. Physicists were trained to tackle a complex problem by simplifying it and applying known laws and equations. Chemist were trained to take into account the complexity, but work it out less mathematically.
.

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