Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eesmith | Hacker News Reader

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Guido van Rossum was not an accomplished mathematician. He has a master's Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, and got a bronze medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad, but the former is because that's where CS was taught, and the latter because he was a smart high school student.

As he described it:

"But after that first year [of college], it turned out that the real math I wasn’t particularly good at. And I think there were some great teachers at that university and some super cool topics being taught. And I couldn’t keep up. I remember something about a particular form of group theory. And I knew—and a few other students who were like, “Oh, you’ve got to go do graph theory, or group theory.” And I was like—it went way too fast. And I suddenly realized I didn’t have the skills to keep up with those topics. But in the meantime, starting almost from my first month I entered the math department, I had been learning to program because they had I think one of the first-year undergraduate courses was programming in Pascal."

Quoting from 'Oral History of Guido van Rossum', https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10273871...

Thank you for the correction. I should have said “trained”.

I believe that "trained" is also not the correct characterization.

He got his degree in CS at a time when CS at the University of Amsterdam was part of the math department. He also took CS classes at Vrije Universiteit, under an arrangement where students could attend courses at either school.

He didn't study group or graph theory and was not interested in mathematics. Instead, he took computer classes:

> the programming classes I got at University of Amsterdam in the math department, were a pretty haphazard collection of topics that didn’t interest me. I mean, sometimes the topics interested me. I mean I remember one semester we were all learning ALGOL 68. And the teacher was super excited, but other times, it was like numerical programming, calculating what the error is after a certain set of matrix operations. And I was not interested in anything involving floating-point numbers, basically. But Tanenbaum, or his group [at Vrije Universiteit], taught topics like operating systems, databases, networks, and languages, I believe. Yeah, Tanenbaum himself did a class where he taught like seven non-mainstream programming languages. And that was all I just soaked that up.

The math department had to "customize" his degree "a little bit for [his] situation."

There is no indication of being a trained mathematician, neither as someone trained to do mathematical research, nor trained to apply mathematics to other problems.

I have an undergrad degree in math, having taken the course for both pure and applied tracks, and even when I was fresh out of college I wouldn't say I was trained to be a mathematician.

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