Math Skills For Programmers — Necessary Or Not?

An anonymous reader writes "Currently, the nature of most programming work is such that you don't really need math skills to get by or even to do well; after all, linear algebra is no help when building database-driven websites. However, Skorks contends that if you want to do truly interesting work in the software development field, math skills are essential, and furthermore will become increasingly important as we are forced to work with ever larger data sets (making math-intensive algorithm analysis skills a priority)."

Comments

Math skills are becoming more important

[TheKingAdrock]

...but it's not the kind of math you might be thinking about, like calculus, etc. Rather statistics, discrete math, combinatorics, etc. are becoming essential skills if you want to be better than average.

Re:Given two programmers

[smallfries]

I'd go further than that - most chunks of maths are things that are absolutely essential for some area of programming. You may not need to know everything all of the time, but for any particular task you will need to know some of this (non-exhaustive) list :

Statistics - useful just about everywhere, but in particular if you have to do any kind of data analysis in your work. Knowing particular distributions and how to compute the properties of them is essential.

Probability - if you use any kind of randomness in your work this is essential and in quite a few places where you don't deliberately use randomness but you are using non-determinism to model lack of knowledge i.e packing and filling of sparse data-structures.

Algebra - the daddy. Knowing a simple formal language that lets you rearrange expressions is an essential first step towards understanding a programming language. The more you learn the more it will help. If you head down to the Category Theory end of the pool then Monads and Arrows come in useful if you swim away from imperative languages and find something more interesting.

Logic - the other foundation. Learning to apply logic is relevant in any area of programming as it is an elementary part of programming. A deeper understanding of propositional and predicate logics is essential to do any work in compilers and will aid your understanding of control and data-flow in any language that you work in.

Linear Algebra - anything that touches the "real world" requires a bit of LA, as the parent mentioned physics, 3D graphics and I would add Vision to that list.

Set Theory - these are your basic building blocks, use them well. Whether it is building the right data-structure or using a database this is the foundation that you need to understand.

Graph Theory - some people never need anything more complex than a relational database, but some people only care about the relations. If you want to model any large network (the internet, or social interactions, economics), or perhaps programs within a compiler, or just the relationships between discrete objects then you will either learn some Graph Theory first, or rediscover it yourself the hard way.

Combinatorics - counting is fun! Counting (and enumerating in the programmer's sense) complex objects is basic problem that crops up in almost every area. For people without some grounding in combinatorics it is the kind of question that will get kicked up to the "office guru".

Now, if only maths graduates could program their way out of a wet cardboard box, then we could truly start designing giant flame breathing killer robots.

Re:Given two programmers

[Opportunist]

I dare to disagree. Programming is basically putting algorithms into a form a computer can understand. Nothing more. And where do these algos come from?

It baffles me to no end every time I see "programmers" apply who consider math as some sort of secondary skill. It's not. It is the primary skill for a good programmer. I do not need someone who can "translate" my algorithm into code. I need someone who can take my problem and develop an algo for it. Coding it is the most trivial part of the solution.