21–30 of 227 posts
I always thought that being an Engineer assumes you have knowledge of mathematics. The way this word is being used in Software ist kind of strange. "I built a blog in php, I'm a Software Engineer" - this feels kind of awkward to me.
The question invalidates anything he has to say on the subject and makes me question his claim of being a software engineer. No self-respecting person in that position would ever need to ask that question or write an article about it. Nor is it worth wasting anyone's time to read past the first paragraph.
Really glad to see I'm not the only one.
I don't have any recommendations for linear algebra, but for stats and probability (which I always found intimidating in the past), Allen Downey's "Think Stats" and "Think Bayes" did the trick.
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CompSci is not engineering. It's almost math major, heavily on the discrete side of things.
This could not be further from the truth. I doubt my CS professors would be able to solve a PDE (or algebraic geometry etc etc). Likewise, few math professors would be able to write a parser generator (or code worth a damn). In contrast, I know engineers who live and breathe PDEs and tweak compilers to solve them faster.
I doubt my CS professors would be able to solve a PDE..
Beyond the basics, not even many math professors can do that. Math is too vast and people specialize. Strong algebraic geometers are not necessarily strong analysts or algebraists or logicians.
The lectures are quite clear and easy to follow. I did do all this math at university, but that was over 20 years ago, so I had forgotten a lot, so for me this course is perfect. But I think it can be quite useful even if the concepts a re new to you.
Edit: Calling it a mini-TAOCP of most of the maths needed for physics/EE work might be a bit of a stretch, but I've yet to see another maths text that does better as a highly readable, self-contained and compact reference.
Edit2: I moved house once and thought I'd lost my copy from university. I eventually found it, and yes, I have two copies... It's that important to me for brushing off the things I've forgotten :)
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Methods-Physical-Sciences...
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Uhhh... a rigorous Computer Science program usually stops one course short of a math minor.
CompSci is not engineering. It's almost math major, heavily on the discrete side of things.
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I always thought that being an Engineer assumes you have knowledge of mathematics. Not really. Mostly just algorithms and procedures of some math concepts(Calculus and Linear Algebra) which roughly corresponds to the first year of North American math major.
Uhhh... a rigorous Computer Science program usually stops one course short of a math minor.
One of the masterpieces that has gone the opposite direction is:
Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning (three volumes bound as one) by A. D. Aleksandrov, A. N. Kolmogorov, M. A. Lavrent'ev (18 authors total) http://www.amazon.com/Mathematics-Content-Methods-Meaning-Do...
This book is really good companion for autodidacts. It's basically overview of mathematics.