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Forget Math to Become a Great Computer Scientist?
Coryoth writes "A new book is trying to claim that computer science is better off without maths. The author claims that early computing pioneers such as Von Neumann and Alan Turing imposed their pure mathematics background on the field, and that this has hobbled computer science ever since. He rejects the idea of algorithms as a good way to think about software. Can you really do computer science well without mathematics? And would you want to?"
> I hate to break this to you, but no. Drawing in 3D is often heavily supported by
> hardware and coded using libraries like OpenGL or Direct3D. But how do you think
> these libraries know where to put things?
Having written a software renderer myself, I am very well aware how such libraries work, and I can tell you that very little higher math is involved in making them, and all that math has already been done. Yes, you need to know a bit about linear algebra, like how matrices work, and have some idea about vector transforms. But you only need to know how to visualize what you are doing and how to implement it, you will not be doing proofs and you will not be doing any theoretical research. All the formulas for transforms, matrix operations, viewport building, clipping, lighting, are already easily available at your local library and on the net. If you want to write your own renderers, you'll need to know a bit about calculus and how to use derivatives to manually step your iterators. But that's all. All your lambda calculus, discrete maths, set theory, group theory, and all other mathematical garbage are of no use here.
> And who did you think newer versions of the libraries themselves grow on trees?
My point is that the vast majority of programmers use libraries, not write them. There might be a small niche for a mathematician on a library development team, but that's a negligibly small market for such skills.
> OK, but we're not talking about Software Engineering, we're talking about Computer Science.
No, we are talking about Software Engineering, which is what most people here do. Yes, universities employ a few thousand professors that do computer science, but that requires an entirely different education path through a PhD, focusing on theory. Most programmers are programmers, and have no need for higher mathematics, which is the point made in the article.
> And you'd better hope the people who are doing that have sound theoretical bases for the models they adopt.
Bullshit. Nobody has developed anything useful in the field of computer science in more than a decade. All the higher-level theory has been done already. What really sucks is the implementation of those theories, and part of the reason that implementations suck is that ivory tower academics developing those theories are so stuck in their higher math, that they are ignorant of the problems of the real world and the implications for their theories that those problems impose.
I am SO glad you aren't in charge of designing CS curricula. What you have just described is a software engineer curriculum, not a computer science curriculum. Congratulations, you are now well on your way to training legions of code monkeys!