What area of programming are you in?
There is a lot of math I don't understand because I don't have the background, and I wish I could. Differential equations and fft come to mind.
There is a lot of math I don't understand because I don't have the background, and I wish I could. Differential equations and fft come to mind.
You can understand FFT without much deep math, it is just clever use of these two properties. Study it, you will really enjoy that cleverness. It is one of those algorithms that still makes me break out into a grin.
That said FFT can get more mathematically involved when you want to compute them on vectors whose lengths are not powers of two. Then it gets into primality, Chinese remainder theorem etc. However, for basic understanding and coding it you need none of these.
EDIT: I would say dont get lost in the details, those butterfly diagrams etc. Just focus on what is the key idea that it is exploiting. There are essentially just two ideas: ditributivity: xy + xz = x(y+z) and symmetry/associativity.
May be a good idea is to sit down and derive a different way to group the multiply and adds, using those properties, to make it go fast. Dont worry if that does not beat the best algorithms out there. You will just get a better feel for the underlying mechanism.
You should just resolve learn these things and work through a section a day.
I have a math degree but never learned these things because my department was more pure than engineering oriented (an ode course wasn't required) and wanted to learn both for my day job. Turns out they are both fairly simple, and there are tons of free books. Esp differential equations have this mysticism to them before you start, and it turns out they're actually very straight-forward. Almost depressingly so, until you get pretty deep into the analysis behind them.
So... here's my encouragement to you -- just do it!