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Ask Slashdot: How Many of You Actually Use Math?
An anonymous reader writes with a question that makes a good follow-on to the claim that mathematics requirements in U.S. schools unnecessarily limit students' educational choices: "I'm a high school student who is interested in a career in a computer science or game development related position. I've been told by teachers and parents that math classes are a must for any technology related career. I've been dabbling around Unity3D and OGRE for about two years now and have been programming for longer than that, but I've never had to use any math beyond trigonometry (which I took as a Freshman). This makes me wonder: will I actually use calculus and above, or is it just a popular idea that you need to be a mathematician in order to program? What are your experiences?"
The bulk of programming jobs have nothing at all to do with math beyond the high school level.
Its mostly counting beans and keeping records. Really, it is.
Gaming, (image rendering and manipulation), statistics, and rocket science are a few of the obvious areas that come to mind where more advanced maths may be necessary. Even these fields have packages available to do the heavy lifting once you figure out what it is that you want to do. Knowing what to do the key. This kind of programming constitutes about 1% of the available jobs and 98% of the chest thumping on slashdot.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
If you want to be an efficient programmer in some specific domains, an understanding of higher math allows you to optimize your code. In game development this becomes important when you are trying to have your cutting edge game run on older hardware.
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go google quaternions, or rotation matricies
properly understanding these sort of techniques that are used widely in 3D programming applications without having knowledge of linear algebra is damned near impossible
It doesn't matter if you use it in practice. You'll learn to think critically to solve abstract problems. Don't buy into the hype that you don't need math.
Follow-up:
Math is nothing more than a language that allows the speaker to make very precise statements. If you can't see how this is useful in programming then no-one can help you.
You are probably not gonna use what you learned in Huckleberry Finn or History, either.
There's a reason these are taught, and it's not all about pure facts.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
While programming is not necessarily math-heavy, mathematics gives you experience with problem solving, sometimes in unconventional ways. It's really the only technical problem-solving you do in school, and it's an important learning step, for what it teaches indirectly as well as what it teaches directly.
It's not necessarily the actual math skills that are important - it's the understanding of the concepts behind it that will increase your understanding of any kind of process, job, or task - programming being one of them. Knowing what the area under a curve means is probably more important than knowing how to calculate it.
I don't use calculus or any kind of advanced algebra in my day to day work (in communications, far from programming) but I'm sure glad that I understand the basic concepts, thanks to a first degree in engineering.
How many of you use the problem solving skills that were developed in math class? I may not use math everyday, but I certainly solve complex problems that I'm sure others with less math education would struggle to solve.
Clearly I've been watching too much Breaking Bad.
The CB App. What's your 20?
Which is also why there is a lot of high school level code out there.
If you never learn more than you need then you'll never know if you have learned as much as you need.
Learning more math won't always make you a better programmer. But it will show you whether you can do something better than someone who knows less math.
You won't command much credibility if you can't even spell "orthogonal" right.
I do most of the design and programming on A Tale in the Desert and Dragon's Tale and I've seldom/never needed to do an integral or solve a system of differential equations. Understanding those concepts does frequently influence game design, however, so having taken those courses was important, at least for the kind of games I do. (Giving specific examples would require that you are familiar with gameplay for each of those games, but feel free to contact me directly if examples would be helpful.)
:)
But on to specific branches of math: You'll certainly use linear algebra doing 3D programming, and IIRC that's considered "beyond" calculus. (If you're using OGRE or Unity 3D, at least at the API level then I'm surprised you haven't run into this.) Applied Math, which is often a college freshman course for a CS decree is crucial to all sorts of programming, especially games. Combinatorics is critical for game design, though if you're just planning to be a programmer, not so much. Numerical Methods will teach you exactly when and why rounding errors to happen, how they can compound each other, and in general help you write squeeky-clean math code. The game I'm working on now is a gambling MMORPG - I probably don't even have to say how important statistics is, if this sort of thing is in your future
Notice how different each of the math subjects above is? A lot of this comes down to learning how to learn, and that's the one thing that in my experience differentiated high school academics from college.