The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
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The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
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Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#2True - you can't go too far in programming without math.
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#3"But is downplaying the importance of math a sustainable message for future generations of engineers?"
No, but most programming is definitely not engineering. Math savvy people will definitely be needed - more in some areas than in others, but it is silly to have something most people don't have use for in their daily work as a requirement.
The point being is that there is a need for people with engineering skills, but there is also a need for people with craftman skills. Perhaps what we are seeing is the early stages of different education paths to the different roles?
As for the different points:
"Number theory. If you’re ever asked how one algorithm or data structure performs over another"
Err, no. That would be courses in analysis, calculus or numerical calculation courses, or courses in discrete analysis if you can find one. Number theory is what you use to understand stuff like encryption.
(Also, the popups was very annoying on the page)
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#4Is CS a subfield of math or is math a subfield of CS?
The graph in this article seems to indicate the latter, but i'm pretty sure that's not right. and how is AI a subfield
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#5I did pretty well in math, both in high-school and in university, (Comp Sci degree, with Math a compulsory first-year subject), and when I try looking at a paper describing an algorithm in some Comp Sci related field it's literally all greek to me.
I end up spending large amounts of time figuring out the meaning of all the various symbols in the paper and how I can map that to an actual computer program.
Thankfully I have enough Math in the back of my mind to work through it, but good luck getting in to the really interesting things (e.g. machine learning, 3d graphics, whatever) without having a good mathematical background. Without it, you'll lose first hand access to almost any paper written on the topic.
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#6Agree. The term ‘computer’ itself comes from the word ‘compute’ as computer is built primarily to help human compute numbers. Many interesting real life problems can be modeled as mathematics problem - Halim & Halim, 2011
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#7I did pretty well in math, both in high-school and in university, (Comp Sci degree, with Math a compulsory first-year subject), and when I try looking at a paper describing an algorithm in some Comp Sci related field it's literally all greek to me . I end up spending large amounts of time figuring out the meaning of all the various symbols in the paper and how I can map that to an actual computer program. Thankfully…
Is the problem there the actual math, or the obscure, arcane notation that's used to describe it?
Combine that with the frequently terrible and all-too-often incomplete source code that's provided as a reference implementation...
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#8I have all the wrong math. I got discrete math in CS - number theory, formal logic, and combinatorics. Now you need more real-number math - probability, statistics, and matrix algebra.
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#9In response to the dead comment
"Is CS a subfield of math or is math a subfield of CS?"
This is quite an interesting question because I watched a Robert Harper lecture where he argues the latter.
In a nutshell proofs can be mathematical objects and in particular they can be seen as programs.
Re: The Immutability of Math and How Almost Everything Else Will Pass
#10I have all the wrong math. I got discrete math in CS - number theory, formal logic, and combinatorics. Now you need more real-number math - probability, statistics, and matrix algebra.
My best advice is to take the fun math, whatever that may be. If a class is fun, you learn it properly, so you will be much more able to adapt the concepts and strategies to other problem domains.
So apart from the mandatory calculus, statistics and linear algebra, as an engineer I took functional analysis, operator algebras, group theory, and intro to hilbert spaces.