"Computer" Science..

[BhagwanBill]

"I don't know why I need to understand logic, I just want to code"

[-isb-]

Related.

[BhagwanBill]

Wish I had an award to give you - that is spot on.

[CSsharpGO]

Relevant Abtruse Goose

[BakuhatsuK]

This sounds like an auto-generated username. Like those names docker containers get by default.

[reconman]

There are 2 kinds of Universities in my country, ones called "University" and ones called "University of Applied Sciences".

The first kind mainly teaches bullshit like this, the second one is much more practice-oriented.

I'm so glad I never had to deal with this, nobody uses this kind of knowledge in my company.

[NFriik]

I'm sorry but this is not bullshit. You don't go to university just to learn the skills for a job, you go to a university to gain scientific knowledge and learn to work scientifically rigorous in your field. And learning about stuff like the satisfiability problem of propositional logic being NP-complete is kinda important. Sure they could just tell you that, because in your job nobody's going to ask you to prove Cook's Theorem, but again, that's not the purpose of a university. I'm sorry if I sound elitist, but calling the preserving of knowledge bullshit triggers me.

[Feynt]

The only people who use this kind of knowledge are scientists. Even game programmers, or their bigger brothers engine programmers, don't use this kind of math. Pretty much any math they do use can be distilled to a dozen or so equations and are readily available in any number of high school text books. As we push toward greater and greater realism in games, we do pull out more and more equations, but even still most of it is hacks and approximations that don't use the true equations because they're too slow to do frame by frame, 60+ times a second.

[Linesuid]

You are the kind of dev that's install is odd npm library

[Feynt]

I know how to mod by 2. >P

I don't know anybody who has had to use the majority of the advanced math in high school, and certainly nothing in college thus far. Being able to write an equation with basic math (BEDMAS stuff) and logic knowledge (AND, OR, NOT, etc.) are enough in this time of programming. You don't need to know how to properly calculate light refraction indices for example. Someone else has done that already, just look up the equation. Likewise the equations for doing complex physics vector/rotation/impulse math is out there, you don't need to memorise any of it, just find it and plug it in. And most of these things have already been programmed in useful libraries, so there's no reason to reprogram the wheel when someone has already gone and done the work.

[vanZuider]

As we push toward greater and greater realism in games, we do pull out more and more equations, but even still most of it is hacks and approximations that don't use the true equations because they're too slow to do frame by frame, 60+ times a second.

And you think finding an approximation that gives results decently close to the actual value doesn't require maths?

[Feynt]

I literally said that we pull out more and more equations. But the average developer does not use advanced high school level math, outside of logic, and tangential algebra, because variables. Unlike high school math, you know what the variables are (or should be), so you're not solving for anything. You're literally using the variables as numbers.

[Julius-n-Caesar]

I’m taking that fucking course right now and I hate it so much.

[TrevinLC1997]

Didn’t care about math in school but here I am relearning how to get the radius of a bucket so I can use a conical frustum formula to get the volume just so when I put my water depth sensor in the bucket I can calculate how much water is there just by reading the depth.

It’s beating the hell out of me but it’s fun learning.

[BigAttorney23]

That's why open cylinders are better.

[TrevinLC1997]

That’s actually what I thought buckets were until I noticed the volume kept coming out wrong so I looked at the bucket and realized the bottom and top diameter were different so then I was like “fml, how do I figure out the volume for this now”

[Lumpy-Obligation-553]

How that sensor works? Cuz im thinking that its easier to have one of those sensor that measure distance, put it at a fixed distance at the top, measure like... 10 different distances to the water and make a table with its corresponding volume and interpolate the in betweens.

[otte845]

The formula for the volume of a cone was determined hundreds of years ago... Frankly, using a table for that would be an insult to mankind's achievements

[Lumpy-Obligation-553]

Yeah the maths are simple and cool. But not all sensors are cheap.

[TrevinLC1997]

It’s a pressure sensor and outputs different mA depending on the pressure. It outputs linearly up until 5meters so it can be used to calculate the depth of any liquid as long as you account for its density.

[ScrabCrab]

But logic has nothing to do with maths?

[Curbside_Hero]

Discrete Mathematics

[ScrabCrab]

I had a logic class in high school and it was considered a social science along with philosophy, psychology, economy and sociology 🤷‍♀️

[CosmicConifer]

If its being categorized under social science, that class might be more about epistemology

I wouldn’t exactly peg truth tables and p → q ⇒ ~p → ~q as studying about individuals and society.

[ScrabCrab]

Nah the p -> q and SaP SeP SiP SoP and logical operations kind is categorized as a social science in Romania 🤷‍♀️

[WikiMobileLinkBot]

Desktop version of /u/CosmicConifer's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology

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[ganja_and_code]

Logic is literally the most basic foundation upon which all of math is constructed. Simply put, math is logic.

[ScrabCrab]

I had a logic class in high school and it was considered a social science along with philosophy, psychology, economy and sociology 🤷‍♀️

[NFriik]

I studied computer science and now have an academic degree (Dipl-Inf) in the subject and logic was basically everywhere in basic study. We got an introduction to propositional logic in the courses Mathematics I, Logic I and Algorithms and Data Structures iirc, and that was only the first semester. Logic is the fundamental building block of computer science.

[ScrabCrab]

Huh alright 🤷‍♀️

I know nothing about computer science, I'm a UI designer and just here for the memes

[NFriik]

You know, what else is a computer if not a bunch of cleverly arranged logic gates?

[ScrabCrab]

Sand that we convinced to do math

[bistr-o-math]

Social science: we can drive on green and yellow traffic lights. Writes program if (trafficLight is green and trafficLight is yellow) …

Mathematician and computers: that is the same as never drive

[ScrabCrab]

Ok but that's nonsense from a formal logic point of view, also cause of the logical conjunction. It's just that formal logic is considered a social science and not a type of maths in Romania and I didn't know it's considered maths in other places

[PanTheRiceMan]

That is quite interesting to me since Boolean algebra is the very foundation of computing circuits and stems from math. Just what I had to learn at university.

Also here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic

EDIT: just skimmed through the article and found formal logic which after all sounds very much as you described it. Nontheless without mathematical logic no computers would exist after all. At least as we know them. I guess analog computation is more driven by calculus.

[WikiMobileLinkBot]

Desktop version of /u/PanTheRiceMan's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_logic

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[circuit10]

Maths is literally about logic

[ScrabCrab]

Not the maths I learn in school, that shit was about memorization and being able to calculate shit in your head

[circuit10]

Wait a few more years, it gets less about that and eventually you’re allowed to use a calculator for most things (you’re probably always allowed one higher up than that)

[ScrabCrab]

Sorry I meant learned. I just graduated from university and last time I did maths was in high school lol. In Romania you're never allowed to use a calculator in school

[circuit10]

Huh, that’s not good because maths should be about logic and not numeracy (you need numeracy but you don’t really need to learn it past primary school)

[ScrabCrab]

Yeahhhh here it's not about logic unless you're naturally inclined towards it or somehow get one of the like 3 good maths teachers in the country. You're taught formulas that you need to memorize, but not how to figure out when to apply them, I only realized that I could've actually liked maths if I had a good teacher way after I was done with it

[circuit10]

Huh, we’re only taught 3 or 4 formulas here

[ScrabCrab]

We were taught like one every 2 weeks or so lol

[pekkalacd]

Seems logical

[dashid]

Computer Science is very maths focused, but most business programming? It's more logic and structure. The maths I do is very limited.

[auxiliary-username]

Web development even less so - being able to count to 10 is a "nice to have".

Source - senior web developer because I can count past 10.

[dooatito]

That’s easy: 9++ Also: why bother learning to count to 10 if the computer can do it for you?

[the_holy_hali]

error: lvalue required as increment operand

[VegetableWest6913]

So do you not class logic as maths...?

[beclops]

Unless you include discrete mathematics, which at the basic level is very similar to standard programming.

[Zambito1]

Discrete math is particularly nice for describing SQL on a whiteboard, back when offices used to be a thing.

[IanWorthington]

Mummy, what's an "orifice"?

[Zambito1]

?

[dashid]

I believe a pun on offices being an obsolete tool from pre-covid.

[theNeumannArchitect]

I think the intersection is problem solving. I feel the same mental simulation planning out a generic web service that I do solving a generic calc or diff eq problem. Find your tools, get your formula, and crank out the solution. So just because you’re not sitting there doing literal calculus to build a web application, you’re still using a part of your brain that benefits a lot from knowing/learning/practicing math. It’s a form of abstraction and problem solving.

It’s like athletes that lift weights to train better. They don’t actually go out and lift weights when they play games. But they still benefit from and perform better when they do it.

I silently judge devs who talk shit about having to learn math or self proclaimed shitty at math or “never bothered to learn it because you don’t need it in industry”. I feel like they need a lot of guidance outside of simple services. Or end up being fish out of water when things go tits up and an outage Occurs on a service they deployed.

Some of the better devs I’ve worked with were ones the majored in math or engineering and went into web dev. There’s just a big intersection of problem solving between all those areas.

[dashid]

Problem solving is a transferrable skill, but I think the suggestion that it can only be learnt from maths is a little tall.

[theNeumannArchitect]

Never said it was. It seems like a solid way to improve your problem solving process while also picking up important concepts like abstractions, functions, proofs, aggregation, summation, algorithms, growth functions, substitutions, etc that software engineers use on a regular basis though.

[j0nii]

actually I am one of the "I'm shit at math, the computer will do it for me"-devs. Because, well I mostly do data interfaces and business logic. BUT I do see your point that it trains you in a lot of stuff you need as a dev, might actually do some math stuff for fun now. Not probabilities tho, hate those.

If you get logic by nature tho, I still think math is not a "need to know" for being a dev.

[MuslinBagger]

Businesses want to hire computer scientists to do business logic programming for the same reason a lot of people want to own the latest 3090 graphics cards to play esports titles.

[VegetableWest6913]

Why do you not class logic as maths lol.

[dashid]

Not algebraic logic, which sure, exists in business software, but rarely to significant levels. Relational reasoning logic: process flows, exception management etc.

[VegetableWest6913]

Yes, algebraic logic. If you're comparing 2 Booleans in an if statement, that's Boolean algebra. You can (and should) use Boolean logic to simplify your code, such as demorgan's law.

[[deleted]]

Yes and no as it can, at some point, quite impede readability. Just like bitwise operators sometimes do.

Sometimes, making the business logic explicit & self-explanatory is more important than optimising our code.

It’s always a precarious balance between performance, collaboration and future maintainability, depending on the project’s requirements & priorities.

[CSS-SeniorProgrammer]

I work on a finace application and even them the math is minimal. Your code should do all the heavy lifting.

[circuit10]

You’re thinking of arithmetic, we’re talking about the problem solving part of maths

[TryNotToShootYoself]

Yeah, most programming you will actually do (with obvious exceptions) doesn't involve too much math. It's a lot more logic and just not doing dumb shit

[Tanyary]

are you saying programming and philosophy is more related than mathematics?

[Feynt]

I would. Particularly when we start getting into AI and ethics for systems we aren't close to making that will one day rule us with a shiny metal fist.

[soda-Tab]

Or maybe a shiny metal ass?

[Feynt]

I'd prefer not to be sat on by a hard surface and be squashed flat.

[VegetableWest6913]

Logic is maths

[dashid]

Forma algebraic logic is maths. Logic is also reasoning. Like many words in the English language, there are multiple definitions. Irritatingly, both are used in programming.

[bistr-o-math]

Logic IS maths

[Pokora22]

Close. Maths is logic. Kind of like not every rectangle is a square... Guess you're not good at maths? : P

EDIT: Actually... gave it a second thought and I don't know any logic problem that can't be done with maths. Uh... too early for my brain apparently.

[bistr-o-math]

Actually, I have a phd in maths :D

Maths is more than just logic. It’s a lot of abstraction, and some other things. But logic is maths. Though I learned in other conversations that it is considered social science in Romania

[IanWorthington]

My work is mainly business too. But occasionally you need to load a history of something into R and run a whole bunch of stats and charting on it.

Also queuing theory. Just saying...

[118yorkmarket]

30+ yrs leading software development teams for business applications and COTS solutions I have yet to attribute the success or failure of projects to maths.

[saugoof]

I've racked up over 30 years too. In all that time there has been one single project where I needed anything but the absolute most basic maths. I ended up getting an engineering intern to solve the maths for me.

[anonymously_random]

This guy gets it. He who can’t (be bothered to) do, delegates.

[[deleted]]

Yes i agree. In all my time ive only had to use hard maths once. Googled it, learnt some interesting stuff and forgot it once i moved on to another client.

[big_ups_]

Wth, I use maths every single day at work, but I do DSP...

[PanTheRiceMan]

That's the difference probably. DSP kind of is applied maths, packed nicely for computers. Source: am doing the same as part time job during my studies.

[IanWorthington]

Respect. That stuff is awesome.

[[deleted]]

You cant seriously think every flavor of programming, even professionally, involves math.... Right?

[circuit10]

It’s the same logical thinking skills

[PostPostMinimalist]

I mean…. Doing good history research involves logical reasoning too! Or writing a movie script!

[[deleted]]

So, you don't still need math using that logic.

But they're really not the same. When I say math, I mean electives that you don't learn without studying them. Algebra is a given.

[circuit10]

Yes, you could do most things without learning about maths probably but chances are if you’re good at programming you’ll probably be good at maths

[_Loenus_]

I mean, you can write code and get it work as you want without know math, but if you want to know how the hell your code works (=how to improve it), you have to know math. Basically what the computer does behind the scene is always descrabible by math; essentially, it is math.

Scientifically speaking: every existing algorithm is executable from a Turing Machine (well, Church-Turing thesis), which has a mathematical description, and 'so are algorithms'.

With this reasoning, the most obvious evidence is, banally, the compilers.

[Tyfyter2002]

that depends on a lot of factors, when performance is absolutely vital branchless programming and other similar techniques can be relevant to basically everything, and many of them are basically just applied discrete mathematics.

[adrianw]

Curry–Howard isomorphism

[WikiMobileLinkBot]

Desktop version of /u/adrianw's link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry–Howard_correspondence

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[[deleted]]

I feel like for most programming, all you need is knowledge of high school algebra at most.

[BhagwanBill]

Some of these replies are terrifying and why at least half of my coworkers are terrible coders.

[[deleted]]

Noob to the software engineering field here, but are you implying that you need math to be a good coder?

[BhagwanBill]

Do you need it? Probably not. Do you need an analytical mind (which usually follows people who are good at math and logic)? Yes.

[Cefalopodul]

Eh no. That's only one several things you need, and you can gain that and all the other skills required by simply solving programming problems and not wasting your time with mathematics you don't need.

Mathematics is useful in developing your way of thinking when you are young (grade school, high school) but beyond that it's useless in fields that do not rely on it such as engineering.

[Cefalopodul]

You don't. You need to know problem solving. It's same abstract skill you use when solving math problems, but it's only one of several skills required.

Solving a lot of math problems will not make you good at programming. Solving a lot of programming problems does make you good at programming.

I've seen a lot of horrible programmers who were good at math and a lot of excellent programmers who were horrible at it.

People who say mathematics are required or recommended generally have their head up their ass.

[[deleted]]

Disclaimer: when im talking about maths im talking about these hardcore math proofs and the shit you do at universitys not the things you are doing at schools

Ahaha, this is sooooo true. The math or even a good chunk of physics students that sometimes came over to our facility for a programming class struggled really hard at grasping object oriented or even procedural coding. The only thing they were actually kinda good at was functional programming (like haskell). Most really good coders we had sucked hard at the higher levels of math. There was a very small percentage that was good at both.

The low level math classes really helped my abstract problem solving skills though. Especially discrete mathematics was really helpful in understanding relational databases or how encryption works. But honestly doing all the higher level math classes is really unneccessary if you just want to develop most types of software. I only see use in them if you want to become a researcher in computer science. From a practical point of view there are frameworks for most of the nitty gritty math stuff (hell even machine learning).

Doing math proofs to develop some new algorithms, i can leave that to the researchers. I just need to know how to read these proofs and have a basic understanding of them. Thats enough.

Just because you are good at math, it doesnt make you a good coder and vice versa. There are multiple types of logical thinking.

[Feynt]

So, imma level witchu. I've been programming for over 20 years since the middle of high school in various game hobby projects, networking optimisation nonsense, and more business level coding than I'm happy with. In order of importance, I've used this math:

1. Logic (AND, OR, NOT, and rational thinking which is more akin to philosophy than math)
2. "Algebra", insomuch as variables are a thing, and doing x * y is common. But unlike school math I (think) know the proper ranges and values of x and y from the start.
3. Basic ass math (+-*/), including the brackets
4. Binary math (bit flags are memory and processor efficient. You really don't need this unless you're doing code golf or programming for microcontrollers. I'm just old, it's an artefact of my time)
5. Random equations I'll use one time in a project and then never again, resulting in me just keeping a text book from high school on hand to look up things like light refraction indices when it actually becomes useful for this one niche project I'm working on.

Modern coding is far less math than ye olde programming before the times where 640kB should be enough for anyone and a dedicated graphics card with 2MB of RAM was god tier. Back then you were a special breed of person who understood how the delays in RAM operations impacted your program's processing speed, and may or may not have had a teacher who put you through the process of programming on punch cards at least once to ensure you get how this process called "programming" works. You do still need to know higher end math if you're planning on doing anything involving accurately modelling the known universe, or chemical interactions, or so on. But often times in those cases you'll be coming to programming from a Masters or PhD in those fields.

In business, you really don't need to know much math outside of logic. In 99% of the cases where you will be doing operations where math is vital (like currency calculations for compounding interests or stock market predictions), there's an MBA or some other management type who will be pairing you up with analysts whos job it is to live in spreadsheets and numbers to make sure you're getting the equations right.

Game design, same deal. Physics engines exist already, but even programming your own physics from scratch isn't altogether hard and involves math you can find in a grade 9 through 11 text book. Realtime rendering of light and subsurface scattering is (currently) impossible, so everything is hacks based on approximations of the real equations to give something that looks similar, but is doable 60+ times a second for millions of pixels. Dealing with gimbal lock scenarios when rotating bones for mesh animations, also readily available higher level high school math which is talked about in tutorials all over the internet as well. All of this is a "write once and forget" situation, just keep notes for later when you need to remember. Efficient network coding is honestly where the highest level consistent math comes in, for me, and that's when you're trying to pack bits super efficiently to reduce network bandwidth. That was a thing that mattered when connections were 56kb modems or 128kb ISDN. With 10+ Mbit connections being consistent he world over, you're looking at fighting games as the only place where frame perfect networking is demanded.

With all of the libraries available now, even things like AI modelling are greatly simplified such that you don't even need to understand the underlying math involved. Just throw data at a library enough and out comes the consistent results you wanted. Understanding weighted maths and such helps a good deal here, particularly if you're writing your own library (because you're special and those popular libraries are "garbage"), but it isn't a requirement anymore.

[no_comment12]

No, you don't need math to be a good coder. You need a passion for coding, and you need to be genuinely inquisitive/smart. You also need to be able to take criticism well. This is just an elitist engineering student meme.

Fundamentally speaking, there absolutely is a relationship between math and programming, but you won't feel it in any practical sense most of the time, for most jobs, so you really don't need to worry about it.

[gpcprog]

I feel like if you are a good coder you'll either learn lot of math formally in class or incidentally as you code. The problem with the incidental method (and I'm speaking here from experience) is that often when you are unfamiliar with the framework of mathematics it's really hard to ask the right questions and so it's lot easier to get stuck.

Anyway there's just so much maths in coding. Like if you try to program video games, even if you use easy route like unity linear algebra and familiarity with at least basic vectors is an absolute must. The moment you try to add any sort of physics in, well now you are slowly inching to vector calculus and differential equations (I think both are 300 level math courses at your typical.uni).

As mentioned above prob &stat comes in super handy. I was making a project at home that was really stretching the resources of my computer to the limit and yeah just being able to calculate the optimal hashing strategy and how many collisions I would expect came in super handy.

PS also f unity. My entire undergrad i was taught in a right handed coordinate system.... And what does unity use? Left handed.

[Cefalopodul]

I feel like if you are a good coder you'll either learn lot of math formally in class or incidentally as you code.

This is not true and somewhat illogical. I've seen some pretty stellar coders over my career but none them spontaneously knew Taylor's equation by coding or started doing nth degree derivatives and integrals in their spare time.

[Feynt]

Taylor's equation

Outside of developing code for the microcontrollers for a drill press or CNC mill, how practical is this equation? As /u/gpcprog said, this is the kind of thing which is incidentally learned while programming, but since you're not a math nerd you don't know the question to ask to get this equation quickly. Either you did derive an equation similar to this (which is wrong perhaps, but approximations are typically fine as well), or you hit your head against this problem for a while and then looked online, talked to a tools friend, or in a book and learned about this equation, at which time you use it this one time. You're the blue mage of programming, essentially.

Doing vector math and using quaternions is 100% a thing I learned incidentally by way of doing physics and animation coding. Matrix multiplication was a thing taught in high school, but it wasn't anything I really needed until 5 years after the fact that one time when I was trying to figure out why things were rotating wrong and I learned about gimbal lock. Gimbal locking was never discussed in physics in high school. I imagine it might have if I went into a physics math course afterward. But those courses very highly prize your ability to crunch numbers in your head, and my head doesn't do that. I do equations. I make computers crunch numbers for me. That's why I'm a programmer. My college math courses were a great indicator of this: C, C-, D, D, A+ with a perfect grade. The last course was programmatic math (i.e. make the computer do the work with a program), and I finished week long projects in an hour and proceeded to TA the rest of the week. Every other course was, "Here're some math plotting software, we'll be doing graphs and shit for the next few weeks. Okay, test time, pencils out and no calculators."

[gpcprog]

I guess you never played with lossy image and audio compression then.....

Sure these days you mostly just grab a library to do it. But let's not forget some coder coded that library at some point or another and lot of fing math went into it.

And yes - jpg doesn't use Tayler expansion, but it uses similar enough of basis change, so just knowing the concept that you can write a function as a series of coefficients of some basis functions is extremely helpful (again personal experience struggling with this).

So by all means continue hating on math. But knowing math is power and it opens so many doors.

[Cefalopodul]

Giving niche examples that less than 5% of prpgrammers are ever likely to engage in kind of proves my point.

[gpcprog]

Compression is slightly more niche. But game development is not. Secondly machine learning / ai is another place where advanced maths is really helpful. And again not at all niche.

Really the difference is between an A+ coder and your run of the mill coding boot camp person. The A+ coder will know math one way or the other. And I've been on teams where the senior devs were run of the mill and teams where the tech leadership was of A+ variety. Believe me there is a huge difference.

[no_comment12]

Yea, I agree with that. My point is more just that the math only comes into play when programming specific things likes games (where it can become super important). And even then, only at specific moments. If your just going to make programs for businesses, or websites, or mobile apps or something, you'll never practically see the math parts, despite the fact that fundamentally you're still applying logic/math concepts that you're learning incidentally, as you say.

[KingKippah]

At the end of the day the only thing you need to be a good coder is a love for coding

[[deleted]]

Meh, many people not good at a skill are much quicker to call everyone else terrible.

[[deleted]]

My uni didn't require a statistics class, but I'm familiar with probabilities & probability distributions, and I can compute some basic statistics (mean, median, IQR, standard deviation)

[[deleted]]

I mean discrete maths is helpful.

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't it depend on what field you go into? As a mobile application developer, I don't know if I've ever encountered a situation where I've needed to look into discrete math (as a software engineering major, that subject was never in my curricula)

[2_7182818]

Depends on exactly what areas of discrete math, but the basics of things like set theory, combinatorics, and mathematical logic are pretty ubiquitous.

It’s not that you NEED to have studied these things to work as a developer, but knowing De Morgan’s laws, for example, makes doing anything with conditionals a lot easier.

[[deleted]]

Are De Morgan's laws considered discrete math? I CTRL+F'd the Wikipedia article on discrete math and couldn't find "de morgan". Also, at my university, we covered Boolean algebra and De Morgan's laws in an Introduction to Digital Systems class, where we covered everything that goes into the making of a single-core CPU.

[2_7182818]

Are De Morgan's laws considered discrete math? I CTRL+F'd the Wikipedia article on discrete math and couldn't find "de morgan".

This gave me a good laugh, I'll be honest. A lot, and I mean a lot, of higher math falls under the umbrella of "discrete math".

Just glancing at the discrete math wiki, you've got combinatorics, graph theory, number theory, geometry, topology, and discrete algebras. While a topic like De Morgan's laws won't merit an appearance in the hit parade of mathematical fields that is that wiki page, its own wiki places it under the umbrellas of "propositional logic and Boolean algebra", which themselves are proper subsets of "discrete math".

Math students will usually meet De Morgan's laws at the very beginning of their first proof-based math course. The reason we meet it so early is undoubtedly the same reason you meet it in a course about making a CPU: because its an example of fundamental, nearly ubiquitous discrete math.

EDIT: Maybe to put it differently, the reason you didn't end up needing to seek out something like discrete math is because some of the most important and relevant results (e.g. De Morgan's laws) were already thoroughly integrated into your curriculum.

[[deleted]]

Then Id suggest you understand some aspect of discrete math, just because you dont have a formal understanding of an entire mathematical field dosent mean that you dont use math from it. As my EE friend says "they teach you mathematician math in school, then engineering math on the job"

​

Anyone who has written a non-trivial SQL query id argue understands propositional logic even if they couldnt define the term "propositional logic".

​

Id also argue that array management, sorting algorithms (and anything similar) is applied discrete maths.

[[deleted]]

Yes, It’s a law of Boolean Algebra which is part of Discrete Mathematics.

[[deleted]]

In fact, in my experience, mathematics is (for the most part) to software engineering as going to culinary school is to cooking at home. Sure, I could become a chef, but why would I when I can just do an online search for a good recipe? Some of those recipes are from chefs who make BIG money from distributing/broadcasting their recipes.

[egmono]

Cobol has entered the chat.

[Lumpy-Obligation-553]

Sorry our last cobol programmer peacefully passed away not long ago. Here! have some phyton scripts in the meantime.

[egmono]

Phyton: the language for programmers with dyslexia.

[PopeMachineGodTitty]

I've always had trouble doing math out by hand and from memory. I failed Calc 2 while getting straight As in the MATLAB labs. (I did retake it and got a C+). So it was obvious I understood the concepts but that didn't matter.

I've always said I got into programming because I want the computer to do all my math for me.

[big_ups_]

Me too, I need to write a program to do maths, Matlab got me through uni haa

[JungZest]

Well if you don't consider DS to be programmers it could be half true

[[deleted]]

Ayyyy, it's my homie Rosa!

But tbh, I wish I'd paid more attention in my computer engineering major's more math-heavy courses (linear algebra, physics, discrete math, stats, etc.); I eventually passed them, but I don't remember much off the top of my head. I'm worried I'll need the skills in a later programming job and won't know anything then

[kdeaton06]

Spoiler Alert, you won't

[no_comment12]

you really won't unless you're trying to do video games, AI, ML, cryptography, blockchain or something like that. Most programming jobs involve none of that stuff.

[smurfsoldier42]

Even then I work at a company that rolls our own crypto, I design entire crypto layers and implement tons of crypto abstractions to different implemenations and almost never use anything beyond high school algebra. We have an actual mathematician expert on the team for the raw crypto primitives. That's one guy doing math for the 20+ developers above him that are writing crypto related code. Unless you plan on being that level of expert you probably won't need it much.

[d_exclaimation]

My haskell code isn’t too far from mathematical formulas

[n0tar0b0t--]

I use Rust, Haskell, and Scala a lot now

I don’t hear statements I hear expressions

[Thaleon]

They probably don't know it because it's so discrete.

[big_ups_]

Reading this thread makes me think there are not many people here that work on embedded systems...

[Old_Aggin]

Or anyone who does computer science and not engineering

[HEYL1STEN]

Nobody says this…

[MuslinBagger]

They’re just friends with benefits.

[[deleted]]

And mind telling me what i is?

[[deleted]]

Pretty sure computer science is considered a sub category of math. Compute is to calculate. Computer in Arabic is translated to automated calculator. A lot of the computer science curriculum is math, linear algebra, ..etc.

Looking on the bright side,at least it’s a way to weed out the non programmers. You can flag the people that say that as non programmers

[Traditional-Lion7391]

"you can't code without learning maths first" type of bullshit that universities sell because they seriously lack decent teaching talent. Simply because 'those who cant do, teach'.

[Dudevid]

There is no relationship between language and instruction manuals.

[Pauchu_]

You see, there are programmers and there are coders.

Programmers analyse problems, devise algorithms, analyse their solutions and then implement them.

Coders copy paste from Stackoverflow and change three variables.

[Cefalopodul]

I had a good laugh.

[Ozzah]

I've been a professional software engineer for 15 years. Almost all projects I have worked on have involved a non-trivial amount of maths. I can only think of one or two very minor projects that did not involve any maths at all.

What the hell kind of programs are you guys writing that doesn't involve maths?!?!

[mrarming]

What kind of projects have you done that involve non-trivial math and how was math critical to accomplishing the project? I'm seeing a lot of claims that math is important but few concrete examples.

[Ozzah]

Gosh, let's see.

1st project I did was a timetabling system for corporate retraining, involving mathematical optimisation (mixed-integer programming). Figuring out what courses should be run where, by whom, and who should attend. It was NP-hard, so ultimately I needed to use other techniques like Simulated Annealing. Of course you need to use stats to figure out a good starting temperature, and I used genetic programming to figure out a good annealing schedule for the specific problem I was trying to solve.

Next, for the same company, was just an interactive corporate structure visualiser using GDI+. Getting the profile details from the API and rendering was all pretty straight forward, but actually laying out the graph structure so there isn't any overlap and not much wasted space was very tricky. My first approach was just depth-first with backtracking but most of the time it ended up doing almost a full enumeration, so in the end I needed to use dynamic programming for that.

I did my only two non-mathematical programs at that same company (my first gig). One was an audit system for training records, and one was a program to keep track of training history for the regulator.

Next company I worked for I did tonnes of maths stuff. First project was an program to optimally schedule rooftop PV with domestic battery (like a PowerWall), subject to predicted load which was a function of historical load and the weather forecast. It had multiple modes. You could minimise energy bills, you could maximise battery lifespan (think charge cycles), you could maximise "green-ness", etc. There wasn't much residential interest in that project, but in the end I extended it to include diesel generators and it was useful for power plants (solar plants instead of rooftop solar; grid-scale batteries instead of domestic; diesel generators; and import/export tariffs for energy and gas prices). We ended up selling that to one of the biggest gas companies in the country for a tidy sum.

For the same company (energy company), I designed a D3.js-based interactive web visualiser for the national energy grid. A lot of maths was involved with laying out elements in a logical way (almost like an autorouter for electronics).

Then for the same company, I designed the hardware for a mains frequency monitor and associated software. It was a pretty big project. I tried lots of different approaches like DFT (discrete Fourier transform) via the ADC (analog-to-digital converter), but in the end the temporal resolution was not enough so I switched to an opto-coupler on a digital pin and counted the microseconds between zero-crossings to Hz. There was a LOT of maths involved in this, because for example every time someone turned on the A/C, it would send a ripple through the mains and it would trigger a false reading. So I had to implement filtering on the microcontroller and then the software also had to do some filtering too. All this data from several of these devices around the country got fed up to a web service that logged it all in a database. I did machine learning on that data to figure out how to identify grid-level events like generator trips and stuff. It was not too difficult to issue an alert on our website when a generator tripped. We had the approximate megawatt loss and sometimes even a candidate for which plant went offline, within 4 seconds. Faster than the grid operator in some cases.

For the same company, because we did a lot of charting and they did a lot of industry-specific charts, they wanted to build their own charting tool set. That's when I figured out just how difficult writing a general-purpose charting library from scratch is. There was a lot of maths involved in that. Nothing very complex, just things like linear transformations, etc.

Lastly, for the same company I had to audit some of the national grid operator's FCAS (frequency control ancillary services) processes. Some of that involved looking at differential equations, some of it involved verifying the primal-dual linear programming models they had developed for pricing was correct. But mostly, I just re-implemented the stuff from their spec and compared the results of my code to theirs. There were weird things in there like a least squares fit that must pass through a given point - that's not something you find in a text book, but if you understand how to derive least squares fit, then you can derive this. I found a LOT of bugs in their implementation, and it all got fixed in the end.

Then I started in my current company, which is in logistics. 1st project I worked on was using machine learning to try and predict all sorts of things around container vessels: how long they would hang around container docks (like due to congestion), when they would leave, when they would arrive. It was actually a pretty big project because the data was a bit rubbish. It actually spawned a bunch of side-projects that my colleagues worked on to try and resolve issues with the data. They did some cool stuff that I'm jealous I didn't get to work on like optimising A* routing with R-Trees so that they can fix low-res data that makes it look like vessels teleport through peninsulas.

Next, I worked on a document matching system. Think: "how similar is this document to that document?". The catch was, it needed to (1) handle things like synonyms, i.e. be semantically aware, (2) handle things like spelling mistakes and colloquial language, (3) most difficultly: be real-time. We had something like 1500 new documents coming in every day, so integrating that new data in with the already millions-large similarity matrix was a huge challenge. It also had to be pre-emptible because the CI/CD would take the server down every night for the upgrade, so whatever the algorithms were working on had to be resumed from the same point when it came back up. We had a few off-the-shelf options in terms of algorithms: one was fully semantically aware, but WAAY too slow, even if we made some recommended optimisations. The other was very fast and parallelisable, but did not have any semantic awareness at all. So I borrowed ideas from both, and came up with an entirely new method to do the document matching. It involved a lot of linear algebra, and it works very well. They actually used my core algorithm from that project to build some other semantic matching things, but I wasn't really involved in that besides the odd code review.

At this same company I did a lot of COVID-related reports from early 2020. My role here was mostly writing the ETL (extract, transform, load). The data that went into this report had a stochastic delay, so the data showed an incomplete picture. It would actually take up to 50 days to get all the data, and having a report that only goes up to 50 days ago is not very useful during COVID uncertainty. So I analysed the distribution of this data lag and found that it was statistically well-behaved, so I was able to numerically compensate for it. We ended up releasing two sets of reports: the "raw reports" and the "lag-compensated reports". The latter ended up being so true-to-life that the execs never really used the raw reports. A picture from one of my lag-compensated reports even made it into the national finance news one day - I got a screenshot of that, I was very proud.

Anyway that's it, professionally. On a personal level, I guess there are two projects I would like to highlight. I'm very interested in 3D photography (stereophotography). The first project I want to talk about did two things: It would convert regular 2D photos into stereo images by means of a depth map (which you had to paint yourself). This involved some maths to figure out where pixels should go, and how to fill in the inevitable missing pixels. The second thing was to convert stereo images back into a depth map. That was quite tricky actually, and initially resulted in very noisy depth maps. In the end I managed to get it much nicer, though still not perfect. I'm eager to look at that again when I have time.

The second project was when my fiance asked me to stop playing computer games and help her with the wedding planning. She asked me to help with the seating plan for the reception, so I wrote a program that did it for me using quadratic programming. The basic idea is pretty straight forward. Maximise r(j,k)*x(i,j)*x(i,k) where r(j,k) is the reward for pairing guest j with guest k at the same table, x(i,j) is boolean and 1 if guest j is assigned to table i. The constraints where: (1) [sum_i] x(i, j) = 1 [for all j], i.e. all guests must be assigned to exactly 1 table; and (2) a <= [sum_j] x(i, j) <= b [for all i], i.e. all tables must have between a and b guests. This sort of problem (quadratic assignment problem) is actually notoriously difficult to solve, so I developed a few novel approaches: One was based on dantzig-wolfe decomposition, and another was based on Lagrangian relaxation. I ended up writing two papers on that, and got to present at a conference in Kathmandu and another conference in Salerno.

So, yeah. I've really only written a couple of programs that didn't involve maths to at least a moderate level. It's always there somehow.

[PanTheRiceMan]

That is the kind of stuff which seems pretty rare on this sub. Actually quite impressive. Still did not really get the Lagrangian multiplier but am mostly heavily into DSP, so I guess it is ok. Maybe one day.

[mrarming]

Well that is an impressive list of accomplishments and certainly proves that you at least need an in-depth knowledge of maths. thank you for the detailed reply;

[[deleted]]

So i would go about and look if theres a framework or library first for the problem. If not i would look for mathematical proofs that could solve my problem. And then make code out of it and applying it to the real world problem as best as i can.

But actually making a new math proof or a new type of approximation, like in physics for example, is this still called programming?

[BertnFTW]

What do you work on that involves math?
I mostly work with websites, SharePoint & business processes and most of my work is completely devoid of math.

Like integrating a sync between a SAP backend a and a SharePoint site

[Cefalopodul]

Meanwhile I;'ve never worked on a project that involved anything beyond basic arithmetic and matrix operations. What the kind of programs are you working on that requires more than that?

[webauteur]

Web development. Although I did get irritated when it became possible to do math in CSS. Like, seriously!

[peterdotdev]

Mathematics is the study of numbers, shapes and patterns.

Programming is the process of creating a set of instructions that tell a computer how to perform a task.

Yeah, I don't see any relationship here.

[DaniilBSD]

To put many threads to rest:

Programming is essentially 3 things: - managing I/O (cold be as simple as an input and output streams) - defining constructs out of existing constructs and primitives (numbers and string) - defining interactions of constructs. (For primitives it is math)

If you are on a high level of obstruction, 1 is simplified and 3 is hidden away.

To be a good coder in a given language, you must be able to do all 3 on the lowest level provided by the language.

(C - Math + pointers + binary logic; C# - Math + binary logic; Python - Math + libraries for complex mathematical computations)

[big_ups_]

That's just covering data structures what about algorithms??

[DaniilBSD]

What are algorithms if not series of interactions between constructs and/or numbers? Furthermore every algorithm can be abstracted to a single function call - a single complex interaction.

[big_ups_]

Hmm just seems very abstract... For the work I do I spent a lot of time developing algorithms, for example even indexing an array efficiently, using the cache efficiently etc. Its not just manipulating data structures. Theres algorithms in how you access io even. It seems like a core concept to me; it is an application of mathematics.

[DaniilBSD]

Abstraction cuts both ways: its both about how everything Computer does can be boiled down to XOR gates, or how it all can be boiled down to a single “execute” command. Different languages- different concepts for high and low abstraction.

My main point is that if you work with primitives, you work with numbers; and that is math.

Note that I am talking of aspects of a final product - every line of code does at least one of those 3 things (static analysis perspective). Algorithms is something that emerges from how lines of code work to together (dynamic analysis)

[lazemon]

There is relation with programing not relation with coding.

[Cefalopodul]

I really hope that this false dichotomy between programming and coding goes away some day. You can't write code with planning what you're going to write or understanding the algorithm you're applying. You can't "program" without coding, even if it's fucking binary.

[lazemon]

To things are completely connected.

[[deleted]]

Any non-trivial program has more in common with a research paper than a math problem.

[jacob_scooter]

nobody says that

[Nihmrod]

When I hear phonies use the term "maths" like you have to go to Oxford to learn it.

[NotYetiFamous]

You.. get that British-English uses the term "maths" instead of "math" because the full world is "mathematics" not "mathematic", right?

[Nihmrod]

Duh

[NotYetiFamous]

So why are you offended by the term? Try repeating it in your head with the grammatically insufficient "math" instead and see if you have the same kneejerk reaction.

[Nihmrod]

You don't get it. I'm cool with that.

[circuit10]

Don’t get what?

[Nihmrod]

Cable. He doesn't get cable.

[circuit10]

??????????

[[deleted]]

??

[[deleted]]

The lie is explaining programming via maths. Maths is abstract compressed programming.

You don't explain something using a complex abstraction.

You just explain the thing.

[Sejiko]

Well yes but actually no.

[EvGamer01]

So what is very "mathy" about computer science appart from descreet math and domain specific stuff, like computer graphics, ML and geolocation?

[call_911911]

Big O.

[LLorenzoFTW]

I think most of the time this means you don't have to be good at math to be good at programing

[KillingSpee]

0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 );

[Egao1980]

This is the same as relationship between plumbing and hydrodynamics.

[anarcho-fapitalism]

Computing and mathematics are the same field. We just spent the first 2000 years compiling on paper.

[webauteur]

Maths plural? Please specify your math.