In a statement, the council rationalized the reduction by stating they wanted to reduce the content load on students in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. On June 1, India cut a slew of foundational topics from tenth grade textbooks, including the periodic table of elements, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the Pythagorean theorem, sources of energy, sustainable management of natural resources and contribution of agriculture to the national economy, among others. These changes effectively block a major swath of Indian students from exposure to evolution through textbooks, because tenth grade is the last year mandatory science classes are offered in Indian schools.
I’m a software engineer and I think one of my personal favorite random applications of Pythagoras/ trig was in my data visualization class back in scool. The assignment was to take a dataset of Soviet space launches with dogs and display it in an interactive approachable manner (ie less rigorous data science and more local science center), so I thought it would be fun to show rockets for each lauch and animate them rotating around the earth. Queue the trig to place each icon an appropriate distance (scaled to the launch height in my data), angle, and spacing from the earth.
I’ll admit it doesn’t come up all that often (in web development), but it’s nice to have that foundational knowledge to dredge up when I need it.