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

What part of Maths ?

[Nicolay77]

Mathematics is a huge field with lots and lots of small ramifications.

You may want someone who understand statistics for your SEO stuff.

You may need someone who knows calculus for a physics simulation.

You need someone who knows a lot of linear algebra if you want to write a search engine.

You probably need someone who knows about concrete mathematics for almost all the rest.

For everyone who thinks that they do not use maths when programming: what do you think regular expressions are?