What Math do You Use?

e_lehman asks: "I've been associated with MIT's introductory 'Mathematics for Computer Science' course for a number of years. The course has emphasized different topics in different years: logical foundations, proofs, probability, combinatorics, etc. But this is at the whim of instructors. What mathematical topics should we be teaching to budding computer scientists? What mathematics do you actually use or need, working in the computer industry? Here are some candidates: boolean logic, graphs, number theory, combinatorics, proofs, set theory, relations and functions, approximation methods, solving recurrences, generating functions, analysis of state machines, asymptotic analysis, and addition of small integers."

Comments

Maths I Use?

[nathanh]

Statistics. I strongly wish I had a deeper grasp of statistics in almost everything I do. Finite state automata and directed acyclic graphs may be all the rage in compsci, but if I compreheneded confidence intervals and probability distributions I'd do much better work than I currently do.