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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)."
The one with more math is the one you want.
Math KNOWLEDGE may be debatable, but Math skills are essential.
If you don't have the ability to break up and solve mathmatical formulas, how do you expect to be able to solve complex programming tasks?
Plus linear algrebra is awesome. And everytime I do anything even remotely 2d or 3d related, I always wish I had paid more attention in Geometry.
But more than anything, its good to know that there's an equation for that. Even if you don't remember what it is, or how it works, having the simple knowledge that it exists to look up is more than worth the time of taking the class.
Another person who is ill defining mathematical thinking. I consider mathematical thinking not only Linear Algebra, Infi et al, but everything that requires exact abstract thinking and has the properties of consistency and a formal and defined "language" to represent ideas.
For that matter, I think that mathematical thinking should be defined more broadly, such as conceiving design ideas and representing them with, say, UML or DFDs as mathematical thinking as well.
So yes, mathematical approach is a must in programming.
Just my 0.02c of course.
4Z5TX
...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.
Asking if math-skills are necessary for a programmer is kind of like asking if people-skills are necessary in the field of law. Some lawyers find success by performing in the courtroom and for the camera, while others find success in their skills with research, interpretation and analysis.
"Programming" is a massive category. Some programmers need incredible math skills to do their jobs. Some programmers convert thousands to hundreds with broken substring operations, then keep their jobs, and make good money doing it. So there's a spectrum.
But if I had to hazard a guess, I'd guess that the majority of programming jobs out there don't require very much mathematical heavy lifting. And often times if you do run into something that could be tricky, it's already been solved by someone else, complete with copy and paste source code.
Yet many programming jobs do require serious math skills, and probably (hopefully) always will.
TBH I don't know if some of the best software engineers I've met are any good at math. They're good at interpreting API documentation, good at structuring code to meet the strengths of the language they're using. Good at project planning, time estimation, and risk analysis. Good at understanding how computer and network systems work and -- often more importantly -- how they fail. They understand how users interact with software, and what users expect and want.
The truth is, software development has become as broad as life & human interest itself, and generalizations about the practice are becoming more and more meaningless.
Heck, perhaps my favorite college course was the one where we proved the equivalence of various math and programming problems. The more ways you learn to think about problems, the less details like the "language of choice" matters, and the more you can think in terms of "what's the right tool for this job".
Plus, as Feynman noted, if you merely have a different toolbox than those around you, people wil think you're a genius, as you can often see immediate solutions to problems they've been struggling with for a long time (and the fact that the converse is true only comes up if you let it). Having a large toolbox has worked quite well in my career.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
This was of course just an example but it's true for a lot of stuff, back then you had to spend a lot more time optimizing your code as well, these days premature optimization is generally considered a bad thing (since in most cases it ends up being a waste of $500 worth of programmer time to squeeze out a performance gain that $50 in hardware would've have gotten you.
If you're planning to sell a million units containing both hardware and software, then "wasting" $500 of programmer time to save even $0.01 in hardware per unit is a really sweet deal.
Pizza analogy: You can't work in a pizzeria without profound knowledge of chemistry
Car analogy: Automotive engineers are the best drivers, the rest are tinkerers
General: Tool makers vs. tool users
Just because most (all?) programming is based on mathematics it doesn't necessary follow that math is essential or even particularly important to the practice of programing. It could be argued that problem domain knowledge plays a similar role. For example, one could equally plausibly contend that without a profound knowledge of banking you shouldn't write banking software. In my experience hiring managers prefer domain knowledge over generalist skills such as math. Personality is another biggie.
I suspect that the tone of this thread is reflecting the prevalent commodization of programming. We wish that smarts, maths skills etc. are important factors, so we can feel good about ourselves, feel smart, important whatever. In reality very few of us will ever again have jobs where math skills are truly important. Dumbing down? Maybe. Some might see it as a natural consequence of the fall of the "priesthood" that ruled computing decades ago.
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?
We are Turing O-Machines. The Oracle is out there.