Comment by darkstar_16
20 days ago
Well, he has a point about Maths :) But, the difference is that basic Maths skills are enough to live a decent life for someone who doesn't do Maths for a career. Basic programming usually isn't enough to pass job interviews and one needs to know the language for a career, atleast for now. I'm actually learning a lot of basic Maths concepts now that I have a kid I need to teach sometimes and have some money I need to invest and understand about rate of return, compounding etc.
This is simply wrong.
If you think about math as only solving differential equations and inverting matrices by hand, then maybe. This might be how maths are taught in secondary school, but is not at all representative of university-level maths. I use many fields of math on a daily basis at my job and for my personal projects, all of which I've taken courses on:
* Formal logic: boolean algebra, set theory. These are the core of any algorithm.
* Graph theory: working with parse trees, ASTs, and other problems involving relationships.
* Linear algebra: any problem that requires working with vectors or matrices, e.g graphics, many areas of machine learning, ...
* Category theory: type systems, algebraic data types, many other functional programming abstractions.
I'm sure there are many more that I've taken for granted.