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Sunday, April 25, 2010

What is the role of math in computer science and programming in particular?

In the book Masterminds of Programming, Peter Weinberger gave an answer which,  in my opinion, is a good one.

Peter: My degree is in math, so I'd like to believe that math is fundamental. But there are many parts of computer science, and many kinds of programming, where one can be quite successful without any mathematics at all.
The use (or usefulness) of mathematics comes in layers. People with no feeling for statistics or randomness will be misled over and over again by real-world data. There's mathematics in graphics, there's lots of mathematics in machine learning (which I think statisticians think of as a form of regression), and there's all sorts of number theory in cryptography. Without some mathematics, people are just cut off from understanding large parts of computer science.

Never heard of  Peter Weinberger?
How about the AWK programming language?
Al Aho, Peter Weinberger, Brian Kernighan

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