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Math And The Computer Science Major
An anonymous reader writes "What sort of math are CS majors expected to take? Why are these classes useful? Does programming really have that much to do with math? Lineman.Net has published an article that answers these questions and more. If you are considering a CS degree, be sure to give it a look and make sure you are taking steps to prepare for your college career."
...demand more math than others. Artificial intelligence techniques, for example.
And what the article said about game programming is right on... trying writing even a simple Brickout clone without knowing basic trigonometry and you'll run into problems.
The Army reading list
I am an engineer working with programmers and one of the biggest issues I have is getting them to implement some of the complex math in their code. Many struggle with it and that is a huge problem.
Evolution or ID?
Let's assume that you are well versed in Trig and Algebra (you should have learned them both in HS). Take, at minimum:
Discrete Mathematics (some call it Applied Mathematics)
Calculus
Number Theory (Cryptography)
Linear Algebra
I have a CS degree with a math minor and have been completely surprised at how often I've used the math portion of my education in the workplace. I'd recommend taking a good mathematical modeling course as well, as it typically offers a great mix of math, engineering, and CS.
Or.. well, it should not. A lot of the responses here mirror the main conception I came across while in University. "Everyone" wants to go to University, but they really just want to learn skills easily acquired at a trade school (not that there's anything wrong with that.) Engineering or CS (notice, it isn't called Computer Programming) majors should be embarrassed to be heard complaining about learning theory. How do you think people figure out new applications? There are entire countries full of hungry people who technically, know how to program. How are you better if that's all you know, too? My assumption is that the people complaining about theory simply find it too hard to understand. Though, the complainers are right, in a way, we don't need that many folks graduating from University. They should just be in some tech school. Oh, and the more mathematics you know, the better. How come most people don't get the fact that since math is just a big glob of abstract structures, you can take different parts and apply them to any application you want?
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Wow, math was anything but the easiest thing on my university schedule. Calc I&II for Engineers were classes they used to weed out students. That said, I really value what I learned.
Calc I or better yet, a calc heavy Physics I is the kind of class that will alter how you view the world. It's a must. After that, you might not use a ton of the math you learn in university at work. That said, taking classes in how to program mathmatical algorithms greatly helps me do my job and understand how computers work.
CS students are blessed/cursed with the likelyhood that some of the math that you learn will be from your CS department. It doesn't make matrix multiplication that much more pleasant, but it is interesting to write a simple search engine algorith that matches a terms in a documents to a vector of search terms.
I disagree with you on stats class. We were allowed to use Excel to do some of the gruelling number crunching for us once we'd done a handful by hand. Now, I can't do any of it by hand from memory but I'm ok with a book. I do understand what they heck is going on with some basic stats work and have a feeling for how to go about doing some vaguely interesting analysis of things I encounter.
The number one reason to learn advanced math is so that when you sit down in a movie and they've scribbled jibberish across a chalkboard in the background, you can follow what's being done, or at very least recognize the symbols.