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A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

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Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#51

Post by VLM »

pjmlp wrote: post #33

I don't get the title. At least on my home country, a Software Engineer job title implies a CS degree with at least two years full of math.

I'll go a different tangent from the other replies, which is there's a whole lot more to math than two years.

By analogy a business school IT degree is two years of cs plus a bunch of biz classes instead of compilers and automata theory (it varies, huge simplification, etc) However, its possible to study CS at higher levels for immensely longer than the two years an IT grad will get.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#52

Post by Pyret »

csirac2 wrote: post #26

Mary L Boas "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences" [1] has absolutely been my favorite and most-used maths text in the 9 years since graduating uni. It's like a reference manual of just about all the non-CS (i.e. continuous/non-discrete) mathematical techniques required in my career. Highly accessible. It's a little too terse in places but I prefer this style of presentation over the insane long-form verbiag…

Note the OP chose typical why-books for math majors(Axler/Macdonald). Boas' is a how-book for physicists.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#53

Post by thesteamboat »

csirac2 wrote: post #26

Mary L Boas "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences" [1] has absolutely been my favorite and most-used maths text in the 9 years since graduating uni. It's like a reference manual of just about all the non-CS (i.e. continuous/non-discrete) mathematical techniques required in my career. Highly accessible. It's a little too terse in places but I prefer this style of presentation over the insane long-form verbiag…

Concrete Mathematics by Graham,Knuth, Patashnik is (explicitly, even) a mini-TAOCP for much* of the mathematical underpinnings of computer science.

* I say much rather than most or all since it's focused on asymptotics, recurrences, number theory. Modern theoretical Computer Science draws on a much wider variety of mathematical methods.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#54

Post by VLM »

bndr wrote: post #3

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.

Originally engineering meant something like applied science for maximal profit, or something like "the accountants of the science world", which requires little if any higher math.

A filter / weedout system was required because of too many students, so its turned into something else entirely and now a engineering degree often means nothing other than having passed the weedout math classes. It really shows in some new grads that don't have any actual engineering skills but are really good at calc problems.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#55

Post by Mikushi »

bndr wrote: post #3

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.

And that assumption is wrong. You don't need any knowledge in advanced mathematics to engineer many types of software, that doesn't make the creator less of a Software Engineer.

Being an engineer means using technology, science, mathematics to solve problems. Well in many cases you don't need math to solve these problems. The word itself as no root in math either, it's based on latin for devise/contrive, sure it was used for builders at first, where math was important, but context changes.

Also Software Engineer is wide and reaching, a 3D GFX Software Engineer will need some heavy mathematics to do his job and do it well, a Web Software Engineer not much, but he'll need to know a wide range of other knowledge GFX guy doesn't know (HTTP, network protocols, various languages, server technology, database technology, browser knowledge,...).

It's not about being good at mathematics, it's about knowing as much as possible about the domain of knowledge your role entails, and surprise, not every one of these requires deep math knowledge and understanding.

Your attitude is pure and simple elitism.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#56

Post by eric_bullington »

decasteve wrote: post #48

This topic comes up every so often. I think my previous comment applies here [1]: I started a Math degree after 16 years of programming without any Math beyond high school (the highest being high school calculus). Most of my work as a software developer didn't require any "higher" Maths. Once I began studying math, including Modern Algebra, Analysis, Graph Theory, Category Theory, etc., I realized I understood many t…

> The range of problems I could tackle as a programmer was limited by math. It turns out this was partly true.

Would you mind expanding on this? I've often thought about going back to school for a math degree, or at least for the core degree courses.

Did functional programming, particularly in a pure language like Haskell, become easier to reason about once you had studied Category Theory in depth?

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#57

Post by eric_bullington »

thesteamboat wrote: post #53
csirac2 wrote: post #26

Mary L Boas "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences" [1] has absolutely been my favorite and most-used maths text in the 9 years since graduating uni. It's like a reference manual of just about all the non-CS (i.e. continuous/non-discrete) mathematical techniques required in my career. Highly accessible. It's a little too terse in places but I prefer this style of presentation over the insane long-form verbiag…

Concrete Mathematics by Graham,Knuth, Patashnik is (explicitly, even) a mini-TAOCP for much* of the mathematical underpinnings of computer science. * I say much rather than most or all since it's focused on asymptotics, recurrences, number theory. Modern theoretical Computer Science draws on a much wider variety of mathematical methods.

Concrete Mathematics is outstanding, and I'm happy to think I'm getting an overview of TAOCP by (very slowly) working my way through Concrete Mathematics.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#58

Post by mrcactu5 »

originally a die-hard math major and now, hacking and dealing with hackers, I have and to question the foundations of my own subjects. I have come to some tentative conclusions:

computer science is computer program, when you abstract away all context so it is just a bunch of symbols

statistics is mathematics applied to the "real world" data, and the art of turning it into form suitable for computer.

Actually, from Lao Tzu's "Art of War", he put's it this way:

    In respect of military method,
    firstly, Measurement; 
    secondly, Estimation of quantity; 
    thirdly, Calculation; 
    fourthly, Balancing of chances; 
    fifthly, Victory.
a solid 2000 years before the computer.

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#59

Post by kryptiskt »

pflats wrote: post #35
nabla9 wrote: post #29

Usually good books travel from English speaking world to other languages as translations. 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…

>Usually good books travel from English speaking world to other languages as translations. How do you know that?

There are some numbers for this in David Bellos "Is that a fish in your ear?"[1], chapter 19.

An UNESCO study of translations between Swedish, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, French, German and English over a decade showed that 104,000 of the 132,000 translations made between all those languages were translations from English.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/That-Fish-Your-Ear-Translation/dp/0865...

Re: A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics

#60

Post by edmccard »

coldtea wrote: post #37
nabla9 wrote: post #29

Usually good books travel from English speaking world to other languages as translations. 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…

> Usually good books travel from English speaking world to other languages as translations Yeah, no. Usually good books get translated, period. From Homer and the Bible to Pascal, Leibiz, Dostoyevsky, Godel and Einstein, good books fly the other way around all the time.

>Yeah, no. Usually good books get translated, period.

Great books certainly get translated in every direction. But for merely good books, I wouldn't be surprised if readers outside the US consumed more books translated from English than readers in the US consume books translated from other languages.

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