Mathematics I Use (2012)
I think if you&#x27;re a programmer wondering what math will help you in your career, which is the question this article is trying to answer, this article is misleading.<p>Most working programmers won&#x27;t have to know any math beyond arithmetic.<p>For instance,<p>&quot;Also, how does one distribute a large computation across globally distributed data centers? You have to understand some physics to do this well: at Internet scale, the speed of light starts to be a bottleneck. Heat dissipation, density of electrical current draw per unit area, etc, are all real world considerations that go into what programmers do&quot;<p>Come on, let&#x27;s be real. In grade school we learned that light goes around the earth 8 times a second. That means 1&#x2F;16 of a second (63ms) to go around to the other side of the world. That doesn&#x27;t set a useful lower bound since this is the ballpark of latency within a country anyway. You&#x27;re just going to ping between the two servers and measure the latency.<p>That being said, programming could in theory require <i>any</i> kind of math. If you&#x27;re doing machine learning, you&#x27;ll need to understand statistics. If you&#x27;re doing graphics programming, you&#x27;ll need to understand trigonometry, linear algebra, etc.<p>If you&#x27;re writing software for the medical industry you&#x27;ll presumably have to understand a little bit about how that industry works, but I wouldn&#x27;t suggest programmers go learn that just for the sake of improving their &quot;general&quot; programming skills.<p>Here&#x27;s a more realistic take:<p>1) Learn math as necessary for a field you&#x27;re interested in<p>2) Know binary and hexadecimal representations of numbers.<p>3) If you&#x27;re going to use a lower-level language, understand how signed&#x2F;unsigned arithmetic works, boolean algebra, and some basics of the floating point representation (in a nutshell, don&#x27;t assume that computations are exact, so don&#x27;t rely on equality (==)).<p>4) Understand time and space complexity. For most programmers, this is going to be simple: don&#x27;t nest too many for-loops. I&#x27;m guessing 90% of programmers will never have to construct an algorithm whose complexity involves a logarithmic function, except for maybe binary search. Even then, most programmers will rely on libraries to do those things.<p>5) Be able to do back of the envelope calculations, and understand that order of magnitude is more important than exact numbers. Try to do them in your head so you can quickly evaluate possibilities.<p>6) Increasingly, statistics and machine learning are becoming important for programmers to know. Learn some basic statistics and it will make you much more desirable. Play around with R or Octave or numpy and don&#x27;t make the mistake of applying too much statistics without thinking, unless you&#x27;re in the marketing department.