Programming

[Anonymous No.6276753]

In the field of computer programming, just how necessary is it to have a good understanding mathematics?

I've been told over and over that "Programmers are just trained monkeys", so is it a skill you can learn by simply practicing over and over?

[Anonymous No.6276775]

>>6276753
>>>/g/ tfo

[Anonymous No.6276773]

Not very.

Yes.

You won't become a professional researcher but anyone with basic algebra skills can develop most software.

[Anonymous No.6276772]

>>6276753
>just how necessary is it to have a good understanding mathematics?
Depending on what you're programming it can be extremely necessary or not very. Also, it will depend on the branch of mathematics you'll need to have a background in. For example:

Comp Sci tier algorithm shit with combinatorial analysis and shit requires some level of combinatorics and discrete math understanding. On the other hand, graphics shit requires some level of linear algebra. If you're doing shit like computational geometry then you need both. Machine learning requires some calculus and is much easier with some linear algebra. Most AI requires some understanding of bayesian networks and probability shit (though not at the very rigorous level mathfags take it to with measure theory and shit).

>so is it a skill you can learn by simply practicing over and over?
Not really. At a basic hobbyist level, yes. At a professional level, no. There's a ton of different paradigms and approaches to software design and development. There is not one "best" way for everything. You can find lots of textbooks on these different approaches.

[Anonymous No.6276779]

>>6276775
Well, someones a little rude.

[Anonymous No.6276792]

>>6276753
>In the field of computer programming, just how necessary is it to have a good understanding mathematics?
That depends on how good you want to be. You can be a programmer without knowing much mathematics, certainly; but it definitely imposes an upper limit on how skillful you can become at it.

>so is it a skill you can learn by simply practicing over and over?
Doesn't that apply to all skills?

[Anonymous No.6276801]

>>6276772
I just re-read this and I feel I really need to clarify something before it causes a shitstorm.

By "extremely important to have a good understanding of mathematics" I'm not saying that you have to know a whole lot of mathematics. The amount of mathematics a pure mathematician will know is enormous compared to the amount of mathematics a computer scientist will need know. What I meant, precisely, was that you may have to have an extremely good understanding and intuition for some basic levels of mathematics (like how someone can have an extremely good intuition for calculus, though calculus is still considered babby tier math).

[Anonymous No.6276811]

>>6276801
Thanks for clarifying that, I was a little worried.

[Anonymous No.6276934]

>tfw Mathematics PhD student and I still have trouble doing babby code sometimes.
>tfw everyone would tell me in undergrad that the mandatory Comp Sci class I'd have to take would be easy for me since I'm an ace in mathematics
>barely made it out alive with a B+.
>I worked as a tutor for linear algebra that semester and, ironically, I'd tutor students in my Comp Sci class in linear algebra while feeling like I have absolutely no idea what was going on in the Comp Sci class.

Life isn't kind. I do enjoy programming, though.

[Anonymous No.6276958]

>>6276753
If you are writing web pages or building some billing system, you can get by with just high school algebra

If you're building 3d engines or aircraft simulations or speech recognition systems, then you'll need to know a lot of advanced mathematics.

[Anonymous No.6276998]

>I've been told over and over that "Programmers are just trained monkeys"
"Programmers" is a category like "people who do math", as if there's no difference between learning basic arithmetic and inventing calculus.

The weird thing is that there are people who think you can belong among the intellectual elite without being a programmer, as if programming hadn't become at least as important as math already, and only becoming more important as computers get more powerful.

[Anonymous No.6277030]

>>6276998
>implicando

lol what? some of the best mathematicians in the country don't know shit about programming, but they're still apart of the ''intellectual elite.'' they're purists at heart, though, and don't really get too heavily involved in programming.

the current generation is slowly conforming to incorporating programming/coding into their mathematical repertoire, but it isn't set it in stone that to be intellectually elite, you must know programming.

there are ridiculously intelligent philosophers, physicists, mathematicians, biochemists, neuroscientists, etc. who don't know programming or know very, very little. there are even people like me(phD student in mathematics, focusing on a "pure" track) with babby programming skills. i'm not claiming i'm apart of the intellectual elite, of course, but c'mon. implying that programming is a definite key to being apart of the intellectual elite is stretching it a bit. i do agree with the second part of your statement; that is, programming is becoming extremely important as time progresses and it will be necessary for those in certain fields to learn the basics of it if they'd like to keep up, especially in applied sciences.

[Anonymous No.6277034]

>>6276772
>shit
use a thesaurus, faggot

[Anonymous No.6277036]

>>6276934
what's your research interest?

[Anonymous No.6277040]

>>6276998

I'm a pure mathfag who knows a lot of programming but it's largely useless for mathematics for me. I can't think of a single thing I can do in programming to help me work out something in math (and not that experimental math garbage the comp sci people do).

[Anonymous No.6277044]

>>6277040
programming is extremely useful in linear algebra, especially numerical linear algebra

[Anonymous No.6277073]

>>6277044
Isn't Numerical Linear Algebra a very small non-rigorous part of linear algebra used by applied mathematicians and actuary science people?

[Anonymous No.6277084]

>>6277030
>some of the best mathematicians in the country don't know shit about programming
Then they're not doing anything of lasting importance. Someone's going to write a program that iterates through all of their work as a trivial side-process.

It's as important to know what *not* to work on as it is to know what to work on. If what you're working on doesn't have immediate practical benefits, and Moore's Law is going to make your life's work a trivial exercise for schoolchildren before you retire, you're working on entirely the wrong thing.

>philosophers
Are you kidding me?

For all the rest, computers are the best tool, far more important than pen-and-paper math. If they can't program, they're not in what will be remembed as the elite in the future, though they might be in a community that's kidding itself today.

[Anonymous No.6277091]

>>6277084
>Clearly doesn't understand what mathematics is or how it works.

No, anon. Quite simply the shit that people do in pure mathematics cannot be done with computer programs except for a few limited exceptions.
It's one thing to use math and something entirely different to create math. Just like the difference between wearing shoes and cobbling shoes.

[Anonymous No.6277098]

Depending on what you do.
Making a mech walker in a video game that supports lua requires lots of knowledge in mathematics, specifically inverse kinematics, while a network chat client needs almost no knowledge in mathematics, but on how networks function.

[Anonymous No.6277099]

>>6277040
Then again, the advent of computer science has effected a major lasting transformation on mathematics. This effect is most visible in foundations (it wasn't until the fields of computability theory and complexity theory that we really understood what an "effective axiomatic system" means), but is pervasive in full generality in that mathematics has acquired stronger ties to the real world via programming. Formality is a much clearer concept now than it used to be in Hilbert's time, for example.

[Anonymous No.6277101]

>>6277091
>Quite simply the shit that people do in pure mathematics cannot be done with computer programs except for a few limited exceptions.
Heh. Sure.

And a computer program will never write a poem or win a game of chess.

[Anonymous No.6277111]

>>6277101
Such things are child's play easily done via an application of machine learning. Rigorous proofs on the other hand are entirely different things.

[Anonymous No.6277115]

>>6277099
The theory of computer science, not the application anon. This is like saying that bioechemical engineers are going to construct something that will make mathematicians obsolete because certain breakthroughs in theoretical biochemistry have led to certain breakthroughs in mathematics.

[Anonymous No.6277118]

>>6277111
You say that like programs haven't done rigorous proofs.

[Anonymous No.6277128]

>>6277118
Point me to the multitudes of groundbreaking rigorous proofs a program has created.

inb4 proof-helper apps

[Anonymous No.6277152]

>>6277115
Yes, I was not arguing that (I am not >>6276998, and agree that his point is silly or at least terribly overstated). Just providing some related insights.

I agree with him though that an appreciation of computer science -- part of which only comes from some experience actually programming -- is very valuable to a mathematician for the different way of thinking about things and the added mental vocabulary it provides, in much the same way that many mathematical concepts -- say, calculus -- are invaluable to many scientists for the ways of thinking about systems they inspire, even if you never need to calculate a derivative ever again.

[Anonymous No.6277167]

>>6277128
Oh, so now it needs to be "multitudes" of "groundbreaking" ones, does it?

The point isn't that math is all being done by computers now, it's that the stuff that doesn't necessarily require lots of computing power already will soon be encompassed by the function of new software on powerful hardware. A thousand mathematicians will find they might as well have been spending their time committing sudoku when someone's program does everything they were all working on, and a million other things they didn't even think to work on, as part of a general function of advancing mathematics.

It used to be that you could just work on stuff, and count on it contributing to the future of humanity as long as it was original and significant. Now you also have to be sure that the same work won't be covered by someone's program before anyone finds a practical purpose for it.

How satisfied can you be with being the first to reach the top of a mountain five years before the helicopter is invented, making all peaks trivially accessible?

While you're fiddling with pen and paper on something that's never going to matter, programmers will be making orbital rockets land on their tails and reducing heroic spaceflight endeavors to routine airline operations. They'll be comprehensively unravelling the mechanisms of life. They'll be building seeds that grow into factories.

Do you want to matter or not?

[Anonymous No.6277175]

>>6277152
I can agree with this. I believe that as a mathfag it's good to get as much exposure to other fields as possible. Seeing all sorts of different unique applications of mathematics into other fields helps build intuition that can be useful later on. I wouldn't say that Computer Science is more important to a mathematician than say Physics or Electrical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering, nor that any of those is more important than Computer Science. Just that they're good to have (though not a pre-requisite).

[Anonymous No.6277178]

>>6277167
lol this should be copypasta.

retarded/10

[Anonymous No.6277219]

>>6277175
>I wouldn't say that Computer Science is more important to a mathematician than say Physics or Electrical Engineering or Mechanical Engineering, nor that any of those is more important than Computer Science.
I disagree. Computer science adds aspects of mathematics, not just applications thereof. The stuff Newton did was comparable in how requirements in the sciences provided a vast new field of mathematics, but few others are. As an example, consider the Curry-Howard isomorphism, a correspondence (not actually an isomorphism) between proofs and programs.

[Anonymous No.6277252]

>>6277084
no, i am not kidding you. believe it or not, philosophy majors score amongst the highest on most standardized exams and are usually quite intelligent. in fact, the greatest mathematicians and physicists were normally tutored/nurtured in philosophy alongside their mathematics/physics program. in fact, besides Dirac, I cannot name another physicist who shunned philosophy so intensely. most mathematicians were definitely aware of the impact of philosophy and how philosophy could extend into mathematics, or vice-versa. for heavens sake man, Bohr practically went into a state of depression following an extremely severe existential crisis. he originally went into mathematics, seeking to embed his " I's " into dimensions of the complex plane. it was only through physics that he found a semblance of solace. he also communicated extensively with the leading philosophers of his time via his father and was extremely close to his brother, who he communicated his work to.(source: rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb; letters to his brother).

russell was very much tied to the idea of philosophy and if you disclaim wittgenstein, i generally won't know what to say other than just read up on some stuff.

>they're not doing anything of lasting importance
that statement is beyond obscene. some of these mathematicians have an enormous amount of citations and though citations doesn't exactly quantify as impact on the field, it's one of the few measures we have. i just don't know what to say.

>>6277036
PDEs and mathematical logic. disparate fields, but i enjoy them both.

[Anonymous No.6277286]

>>6277091
>implying computer programs can't write better proofs than people

[Anonymous No.6277298]

>>6277286
>Paper was rejected.
Top lel

[Anonymous No.6277303]

>>6277298
AI got a lot of shit back then.

[Anonymous No.6277358]

>>>/g/

fuck you sci, you can't have programming. Learn you're fucking place you fucking poor ass mouth breathing lab assistants.

[Anonymous No.6277370]

>>6276775
If you take that to heart, then you yourself are very stupid.

[Anonymous No.6277374]

How do I learn to code?

Also, how do I create a website that attracts heavy traffic and brings me great profit?

Thanks.

[Anonymous No.6277403]

/g/ here.

1. Depends on the specific field. Security, encryption and AI, among others, use mathematics a lot.

2. Depends on a lot of stuff. Programming an OS such as Windows or Linux is extremely complex. One example is ensuring the user can run multiple programs on a single core CPU. The computer is literally doing one thing at a time, while you get the experience you're browsing 4chan while listening to music and downloading torrents at the same time.

[Anonymous No.6277466]

>>6276753
lol, that question even makes any sense, since computation is applied to every field, if you are a software developer of mathlab, sure you have to learn math, depends on the field where you applies it to.

[Anonymous No.6277570]

>>6277128
>proof-helper app

Seriously? What are these?

[Anonymous No.6277574]

>>6277374

1. Learn Ruby on Rails
2. Create or steal content
3. Profit!

[Anonymous No.6277587]

>>6277403

What maths is used for security, instrumenting a practical fuzzer for things like dangling pointers where you run into the path explosion problem?

[Anonymous No.6277638]

>>6276753
I took the first two intro to programming classes at my university just to get some exposure to programming. I guess what you're saying is kinda right. With enough effort most people could probably become alright programmers, and my dad always tells me that in the 80s or 90s he saw a lot of housewives going back to school to get CS degrees.

I remember there were a lot of stoner/gangster type guys in my classes. Some of them were a bit older, like maybe approaching 30. They were still pretty immature and acted like assholes most of the time, but they still did their work and got pretty good grades in the class.

CS majors here only have to take up to integral calc. or multivariable unless they choose to take an upper division stats or proofs class. I talked to a few of my calc. professors back then and they agree that it's mostly just plug and chug. As long as you do the homework you're guaranteed to pass the class and get your degree.

[Anonymous No.6277639]

>>6277587
Encryption.

Information theory, coding theory, abstract algebra, number theory.

[Anonymous No.6277837]

>>6277358

this

[Anonymous No.6277842]

>>6277358
>fuck you sci, you can't have programming. Learn you're fucking place you fucking poor ass mouth breathing lab assistants.

Ah… /g/… where kids share screens of their cheap chinese Android phones and dress them up like Barbie Dolls. Why would anyone go to /g/ to get help with programming?!?!?!

[Anonymous No.6277866]

>>6277358
>tfw I find the Asian and blond guys kind of hot
Am... am I gay, /sci/?

[Anonymous No.6277878]

>>6276753
>how necessary is it to have a good understanding mathematics?
> "Programmers are just trained monkeys",
depends a lot, you see people are rarely programming stuff like drivers, database managers, encryption methods, routing protocols or operative systems, you know, things actually requiring finesse and the kind of knowledge you could best get at college
a lot of programming is web code and web maintenance, not much math needed, but a logical and abstract way of thinking certainly help
then there is programming business and industry processes, which requires knowledge of the kind of algorithms best suited to certain contraints
but yeah A LOT, but not all, programmers are just modern pencil-pushers, whose skilss can be learned from a technical degree and apprenticeship

[Anonymous No.6277894]

>>6276753
Not perfectly necessary to code, although understanding how binary and hex works, and coding various algorithms, array sizes, general operations, knowing how much memory to allocate to something depending on what the range of numbers is, etc, is rather important.

So you don't need super advanced math for most applications (although you can definitely program things that use calculus for plenty of real world applications, like PID), but a solid understanding of math is important.

[Anonymous No.6277933]

>>6276753

Physics simulation.

Fun stuff honestly. Everyone always says, "Don't reinvent the wheel," when it comes to using a Physics engine, but it's super fun in my opinion. Designing the data structures to fluidly run in real-time is a process that takes a while to perfect the first time round. It is well worth it in my opinion because you get a good understanding of optimization along with proper code hierarchy.

[Anonymous No.6277993]

>>6276772
>shit shit shit
>shit shits shit
>shit shit

[Anonymous No.6277995]

>>6277866
Most people are a little gay.
Sexuality is more of a sliding scale than a binary choice.

[Anonymous No.6277997]

>>6277995
sure, keep telling yourself that

girls are a little gay
guys aren't

[Anonymous No.6278001]

>>6277997
Keep telling yourself that. Maybe the god that governs science will see your unwavering faith and make it true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_scale
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinsey_Reports#Sexual_orientation

[Anonymous No.6278014]

If you want to do regular code monkey Indian-tier shit then you can get away with barely even understanding algebra.
I'm not even joking.

[Anonymous No.6278699]

>>6277570

One example here : http://coq.inria.fr/

[Anonymous No.6278724]

>>6278001
Kinsey was nothing but a biased pervert propagandist.

[Anonymous No.6278736]

>2014
>my sides when somebody claims to be a scientist but doesn't know how to code

[Anonymous No.6278758]

modular arithmetic is the highest level of math it ever gets.

[Anonymous No.6279171]

>>6277128
There is one field of computer science that can be considered the most successful. It is the subset of Artificial Intelligence known as "Expert Systems". There are Expert Systems programs that are designed to interpret mass-spectrometer data that have been awarded PHD's in Chemistry.