People say this in a very large number of other contexts. Mathematica has been able to do many integrals for decades and yet we still make students learn all the tricks to integrate by hand. This pattern is very common.

▲

FrojoS 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes. But to be fair to your specific point, symbolic solving of integrals used to be a huge skill in the engineering education. Nowadays, it is not a focus anymore, because numerical solutions are either sufficiently accurate or, more importantly, the only feasible approach anyway.

▲

nathan_compton 5 hours ago | parent [-]

There is much more to life than engineering.

▲

FrojoS 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Sorry, I should have quoted properly in my reply. My first sentence ("Yes.") was in general agreement with you, the second sentence was specifically about

> Mathematica has been able to do many integrals for decades and yet we still make students learn all the tricks to integrate by hand

But maybe, integrating by hand is still as big as ever in other parts of academia. Or were you thinking about high school? I'm fairly sure, that symbolic solving of integrals is treated as less important in education these days, than it was before digital computers, but I could be wrong. Mathematica's symbolic solve sure is very useful, but numeric solutions are what really makes the art of finding integrals much less relevant.

	▲	nathan_compton 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I studied physics and mathematics and finding analytic solutions to problems is still useful and enlightening.