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As a programmer, get your math sorted

csprimer.in

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Re: As a programmer, get your math sorted

#6

Post by bsnnkv »

> Master the mathematical foundations essential for computer science

I get that this is marketing fluff, but I really don't like this sort of gatekeeping - it's what kept me from programming until I was almost 30

These days I'm quite a prolific programmer both on the clock and in my free time, and I wish I could have started earlier now that I know how little math is involved or required to build useful and beautiful things as a programmer

Re: As a programmer, get your math sorted

#9

Post by david-gpu »

During my professional career the most complex math I had to use was, perhaps, a square root. Something on that ballpark. And that's coming from somebody who enjoyed learning Runge-Kutta methods in college.

Your mileage will vary. I didn't even touch a DBMS after college, either, and I think that is going to be far more useful for the average programmer.

Re: As a programmer, get your math sorted

#10

Post by modulovalue »

The university I went to started its math education with groups, which is really unfortunate and they never even mentioned monoids.

Monoids are a key idea in computer science and I think that everyone should know what monoids are. Monoids are EVERYWHERE and once you recognize that you have a monoid you can immediately use known methods to compute over monoids in efficiently (e.g. https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/research.google.c...).

Once you have a certain lattice (I'm leaving out some details), you can solve problems efficiently by known methods (e.g. using dataflow solvers) and automatically have a proof that the solution always terminates.

I really wish that more people took their time to learn these fundamentals and I think this is a wonderful introductory site. I don't mean to offend anyone, but if you've never heard of most of that stuff, then I think that you don't deserve to call yourself a professional programmer. Why? You will reinvent solutions to problems that have been solved before much more efficiently then you will be able to i.e. you're an amateur.

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