Timeline for What does mathematics have to do with programming?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| May 7, 2024 at 15:55 | comment | added | user393243 | It was a bonafide heart-felt post, however the phrase "Mathematics is Programming" stabs me like a prick. Should have been "Programming is Mathematics" $\verb{math} \notin \verb{prgn}$ but $\verb{prgn} \in \verb{math}$ | |
| Apr 8, 2018 at 15:18 | comment | added | theringostarrs | Great answer! Thanks. I'm a programmer that found the Maths papers requisites for Comp Sci hard in university as they never related it to anything, even abstract, just a bunch or rules and corollarys. I passed but was none the wiser what to do with what I learnt. I have come back to it 10 years later and looked for better explanations and for some reason it seems to make more sense and is very very interesting. I wish I had this insight years earlier. | |
| Apr 13, 2017 at 12:34 | history | edited | CommunityBot | replaced http://tex.stackexchange.com/ with https://tex.stackexchange.com/ | |
| Mar 11, 2016 at 16:43 | comment | added | Polymer | @mike3 It depends. In beginning Analysis you would prove the equivalence of sequential compactness and topological compactness. Depending on the proof, the wrong choice could be difficult or impossible to use while the other is trivial. There is a mapping between constructive proofs and programs, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspondence. Even the above examples you mentioned are often solved by Wolfram Alpha. How that is possible is important to both Math and Computer Science. | |
| Mar 6, 2016 at 4:02 | comment | added | The_Sympathizer | An important point I should point out is I'm not sure how often this is really taught in a math course. E.g. I see many problems like "Solve equation X" or "Crunch out integral of Y" or whatever, but not many problems of the form "Find 3 different ways to define/describe a Z", which is REALLY what you want to get that vital abstraction capability. If you don't exercise that specifically, you won't have it. | |
| Oct 22, 2014 at 14:55 | comment | added | qed | Is there a good book on the math OF programming (looking at programming mathematically)? | |
| Jul 12, 2014 at 7:01 | comment | added | Val | That is why they are so sure (you mock this belief out in your answer) that DRY does not exist outside the field, though it is universal principle of any truth/beauty/efficiency, aka Occam's Razor. I am tired of programmer stupidity and math arrogance. | |
| Jul 12, 2014 at 6:59 | comment | added | Val | Well, I like to see that things are identical essentially, at the abstract level. Yet, I am punished for that thinking. Mathematicians say that programming functions are not pure and just punish me when I ask to clarify the difference between single num and single-entry vector, math.stackexchange.com/questions/384927. They say that there is not single notion of vector, e.g. programmers forbid to think about objects as collectins of fields which identifies them with DB records and dynamical system state vectors. | |
| Apr 22, 2012 at 1:56 | comment | added | Fiasco Labs | Exactly. You cannot program well without the analytical thought that mathematics teaches you. | |
| Apr 18, 2012 at 1:05 | comment | added | leo | Registered just to upvote this | |
| Apr 3, 2012 at 22:03 | comment | added | Barry Brown | Dude, +100 for that. | |
| Mar 2, 2012 at 23:36 | comment | added | Jason Lewis | This is one of the best answers I have ever read on SE; BTW, there is a grand book of "Mathematics for Programmers"; it's called Concrete Mathematics and it's co-written by the author of TeX, Donald Knuth. I just got a copy, and it's fantastic. I feel like your inverse; I got serious about programming when I realized that the best way (for me) to understand concepts in math class was to write a program to do it for me. Of course, then I wanted to use the program instead of doing rote computation by hand, and my math teachers did not like. | |
| Mar 2, 2012 at 22:21 | history | edited | Andrew Stacey | CC BY-SA 3.0 | Expanded a bit in response to comments and other answers. |
| Feb 28, 2012 at 8:09 | history | made wiki | Post Made Community Wiki by Jack | ||
| Feb 27, 2012 at 8:58 | history | answered | Andrew Stacey | CC BY-SA 3.0 |