Comment by icecreampain | Hacker News Reader

Comment by icecreampain | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions how most of us are introducted to math and the reaction most of us have to math in later life: "Oh no, I don't want to hear about this, I was so bad at math." The article continues about how wonderful math is and what not.

The article is wasting our time.

Those of us who were force-fed useless mathematics since 1st grade have already closed our minds completely to any attempts at beautifying something that we normal people, after +-/, see as completely fucking useless, boring and hate-inducing. At least I feel that way, but I assume I'm not alone.

I was force fed not only simple +-/ but several university level courses. Why? Because I wanted to get myself a programming degree and for that one, somehow, needed a whole bunch of weird-ass algebra and shit. I could see no reason for learning that at 15, when I was writing Pascal and PCBoard PPEs, no reason for learning that at 20 when I was writing C/C++ shit and no reason now at 30+ when I'm writing webapps in PHP/js/html5/etc. But time and time again I was told that without that complicated mathematics I wouldn't become shit.

Well, now I'm making a living programming, without a degree, and without being able to derive x2 from god-knows-what. My mind has PROVEN to me that I don't need complicated math and therefore cemented my previously belief that advanced math is necessary to program.

Not once during all my years of school and university was I ever shown a use for that advanced math, even though I _begged_ for at least some connection to reality, some proof that the math is going to be useful for anything else other than passing an exam. Do my SQL queries speed up if I use cosine? Will my code autoindent properly if the square root of x^y is used? No. Instead I was told to just learn it because I'd use it "some day".

My brain is now completely, 100% closed to advanced math. So what this Edward guy in the article should do is not try to change our minds, or even change the minds of the kids of today that are being force-fed math. Instead he should concentrate his efforts on bringing the teachers (and curriculum) down to earth. Change the way math is taught. Bring in real-world examples of why derivations are somehow important. After that is done then the NEXT generation won't fucking hate math, and mathematicians, as much as use older folk do.

Fuck I hate math.

That's pretty sad. Programming and mathematics are normally things that go together, like burgers and beer. I can't imagine loving one and not the other. I do sympathise with the wish to see a practical application. I have a distinct recollection of an ah-ha moment for me, at about 15 years of age. We were being taught basic calculus. The idea was introduced that a function f(x) could be used to represent the yield of some industrial process. You put in x, you get out y = f(x). So far, so obvious, so boring right? But then came the cute part; If you can calculate the derivative of f(x), you get another function f'(x) which is the slope of f(x) for any value of x. Then to find the maximum yield you seek the value of x where f'(x) = 0, because the slope of f(x) will be zero 'at the top of the hill'.

I guess it's a personal thing, but for me this fired my enthusiasm for both learning the various techniques for differentiation, and for equation solving. Then integration followed as simply reverse differentiation [amazing - one is the area under the graph - one is the slope of the graph - why should they be opposite ? Because maths is beautiful is the short answer - a universe of discovery is the long answer]. Around this point maths became fun, the work part evaporated. Later I got interested in computation because you can't always differentiate or solve equations analytically (with pure math), but you can do it numerically, to any desired degree of accuracy with a computer.

> The article is wasting our time.

indeed. here's a better link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langlands_program

> Fuck I hate math.

this is the only other sentence of your post i had time for, and all i have time to say in response is that i don't.

As a more advanced examples take a look at perfect hashing. Without some randomization an attacker can produce collisions for any fast hash functions and thus degrade your hash table to the worst case possible. This was a real DoS attack vector in real web applications (see for example https://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2011-December/1... ). With a little advanced math this matter is trivial to solve.

Something else I remember was a computer graphics professor saying that the fast fourier transform was the greatest invention after the wheel.

Generally speaking you can find programming jobs where you need basically no understanding of mathematics. But computational engineering science is so much more than programming. Conversely often enough the abstract thinking that is the core of mathematics can greatly help you to tackle the more complex problems you can encounter in programming.

Software is a very broad field and you are painting with a very broad brush. It is true that for many branches of software you do not need much in the way of advanced mathematics. But EVERY graphics programmer I have ever met has told me he wishes he had paid more attention in higher level math courses. The same holds true for folks doing signal and image processing, computer vision, artificial intelligence, and on and on...

You've got a list of stores, and a person's location. Which store is closest?

You are buying ads online, and want to maximize your ROI.

You have 6 types of EC2 nodes you can use, and you want to pick the most efficient set for your mildly parallel work.

See that https in your browser bar right now? You can thank math for that.

From the examples in your post, it seems like you only got to calculus. Which is not really advanced math.

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