Ask HN: Best mathematics courses for programming and intrigue?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6084448

by bsima • 13 years ago

7 5 13 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

What college courses did you take that you found to apply to programming (e.g. algorithms, logic) or found to be genuinely interesting?

FWIW: I'm a philosophy major with many courses in medicine, but it turns out RIT doesn't have a medically-related minor. So I'm turning to math. I start my math minor in a month. I've taken calculus and biostats previously. I know Perl, PHP, JavaScript, R, SQL, shell scripting and CSS/HTML. I do computational biology research with a professor and I hope to translate coding skills into an intro level job at a startup like Comprehend.com or Automattic.com.

tjr• 13 years ago

You might consider taking linear algebra.

codegeek• 13 years ago

I suggest the following:

Combinatorics [1]. I took it in college and was really interested and the professor made us program in Mathematica as well.

Probability and Statistics

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics

gabeguz• 13 years ago

Just off the top of my head:

Boolean Logic

Automata + Computability

Statistics

Relational Algebra

dscb• 13 years ago

Discrete Mathematics

Logic, Set Theory, & Proofs

Linear Algebra I/II

solidparallel• 13 years ago

Linear algebra can be useful depending on what you plan to work with (SUPER useful for graphics, not so useful for building a simple online game)

Probability and Statistics. A MUST if you want to look into AI or machine learning.

Discrete math was cool, but I have found it largely not useful in my career thus far. But I think a large part of that is me being a programmer as opposed to a computer scientist, and also not someone who works with circuits. Neat class though.

That's all I can personally speak to.

Ask HN: Best mathematics courses for programming and intrigue?

Related Stories