Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

news.ycombinator.com

11–20 of 46 posts

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#11
Set Theory and Abstract Algebra really came in handy for Comp Sci.

All of Relational Database theory seems to be based on it.

Same with Logic and Predicate Calculus, Linear Algebra and Statistics.

You know what I have barely used though: Calculus and Trigonometry. Basically most things you study for a Physics major.

But that's just my experience.

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#12
Counter point - I am terrible at Maths, like awful.

I failed Maths for Computer Science in my degree but managed to get a pass on it as all my other grades were great. Overall it has really not affected my life in any way or my career throughout my 15 years as a code monkey through many roles into now a CTO position for the past 5.

There are a lot of things and patterns you pick up as you go, and maybe I just got lucky and was in the sweet spot of tools developing fast enough to act like a permanent crutch for lack of mathematic ability.

I guess this is different if I were planning to be a game programmer but for a web focused engineer it has been absolutely fine

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#13
I'm writing a book just for you :)

It's called "Practical Math: A Tour of Mathematics in Production Software" (https://pmfpbook.org points to an announcement and mailing list)

The idea is to give a large swath of examples of math used to solve real problems, and collectively to give a good answer to your question. And to have the examples be appreciable by the average programmer, in the sense that they could reasonably expect to adapt the underlying ideas in their own work.

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#14
post #12

Counter point - I am terrible at Maths, like awful. I failed Maths for Computer Science in my degree but managed to get a pass on it as all my other grades were great. Overall it has really not affected my life in any way or my career throughout my 15 years as a code monkey through many roles into now a CTO position for the past 5. There are a lot of things and patterns you pick up as you go, and maybe I just got luc…

I would agree, your typical dev writing CRUD apps needs an ok grasp of algebra, and that's about it.

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#15
As others have mentioned, it really depends on how expansive is your definition of major CS theory. In CS research, one finds math results being used from all over the place ranging from dynamical systems to non-monotonic logic.

My guess is first-order logic, set theory, combinatorics/graphs, rigorous probability/analysis, and abstract algebra. At least being familiar with concepts from these areas would help make sense of what's going in, say, complexity theory or cryptography.

I put together a guide to learning complexity theory at the graduate level [0]. This may be a decent proxy for your question.

[0] https://bcmullins.github.io/complexity_theory_resources/

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#16
post #5

> I've learned You’ve got all you need. You can learn programming now.

They mentioned probabilities, but not measure theory. They might want a deeper and more intuitive understanding that they'd get through measure theoretic probability before going too deep into programming.

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#17
post #12

Counter point - I am terrible at Maths, like awful. I failed Maths for Computer Science in my degree but managed to get a pass on it as all my other grades were great. Overall it has really not affected my life in any way or my career throughout my 15 years as a code monkey through many roles into now a CTO position for the past 5. There are a lot of things and patterns you pick up as you go, and maybe I just got luc…

I've worked with lots of engineers and programmers who are in the same boat, and they do just fine. I personally think that a person has to be genuinely interested in math beyond maybe high school algebra, in order to do anything with it beyond passing their college classes.

A few of us are happy to take care of math for everybody else. I'm in that boat. And I can't even honestly say it's gotten me further then the math-averse folks, but maybe it's helped me compensate for some of my other deficiencies.

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#18
My whole career has been in-house industrial stuff. I've never used past trig--and that only to draw a picture of a toilet. (Legitimate--while we didn't do anything with toilets the graphic marked where it would be, thus where our stuff couldn't be.)

I have found a possible use for error correcting codes but that's way beyond anything I ever studied and thus it probably will never be implemented.

Re: Ask HN: Math for Programmers?

#20
post #13

I'm writing a book just for you :) It's called "Practical Math: A Tour of Mathematics in Production Software" ( https://pmfpbook.org points to an announcement and mailing list) The idea is to give a large swath of examples of math used to solve real problems, and collectively to give a good answer to your question. And to have the examples be appreciable by the average programmer, in the sense that they could reasona…

> It will be much easier than pimbook to sample and read casually. It could be a bathroom reader for the stalls of software firms.

Thank you, I have a copy and it went over my head a couple times so I guess I wasn't exactly the target.

Also not sure if this fits within the scope but something like this would be great for those not already familiar with it, helped me a lot - https://github.com/Jam3/math-as-code

Post reply on HN