I have got to disagree. Sure, Fast Fourier Transforms are a tad on the tricky side, but that does not excuse ignoring the basics that anyone should be able to understand. And if you cannot, in my opinion you have no business writing computer programs professionally, because there's a good chance you're the reason the job can get tough for the rest of us. Average quality of computer programmer is very low in my experience, and an understanding and appreciation of these concepts would help to change that.
To say Advanced Calculus is necessary is completely disingenuous. I escaped a large chunk of the Math's I was taught at University, but got by with the algorithms classes. Certainly some of the highly acadcemic algorithms (going into N log log N etc.) that you do not use in every day life can be difficult to calculate the complexity of, however at least an intuitive understanding of what causes complexity to spiral and how to avoid it is IMHO one of the most important pieces of knowledge for a computer programmer.
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I have got to disagree. Sure, Fast Fourier Transforms are a tad on the tricky side, but that does not excuse ignoring the basics that anyone should be able to understand. And if you cannot, in my opinion you have no business writing computer programs professionally, because there's a good chance you're the reason the job can get tough for the rest of us. Average quality of computer programmer is very low in my experience, and an understanding and appreciation of these concepts would help to change that. To say Advanced Calculus is necessary is completely disingenuous. I escaped a large chunk of the Math's I was taught at University, but got by with the algorithms classes. Certainly some of the highly acadcemic algorithms (going into N log log N etc.) that you do not use in every day life can be difficult to calculate the complexity of, however at least an intuitive understanding of what causes complexity to spiral and how to avoid it is IMHO one of the most important pieces of knowledge for a computer programmer.