Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudo_bang_bang | Hacker News Reader

I never studied math in college, in fact I barely studied math in high school. It was always daunting to try to parse the notation and figure out how the abstract symbols corresponded to some piece of reality.

When I became a self-taught developer I found my math skills continuously lacking. I started teaching myself on Khan Academy and really picking it up a lot better because of the simplicity of the language and the good examples. I finally realized I learned math best visually.

Interactive lessons like these are great. There are things that can be improved about this book (load times and enhanced interactivity) but all in all this a great resource for people that learn best visually. I'll come back to this soon in my future self-education.

View on HN

What exactly do you do when you need math skills in developing? What do you develop with it? Some specific examples?

I've done math while developing 3D stuff, physics simulation and a lot of things - yet I never felt like my math skill mattered that much. And I really dislike theoretical math like in school.

Math is certainly not for everyone, but I actually found that once I started diving into pure math (NOT what was taught in my school's math curriculum) it was a whole new world.

Did your school actually teach pure math?

I bet a lot of programmer types had similar frustrations to the computationally intensive version of math taught in many high schools when they knew that these processes could simply be automated.

This. I had the same experience. By the time I realized this, I was sufficiently jaded that it made devoting my own time to learning it sting more than a little.

I don't even know what pure math is to be honest. The courses I specifically lost interest in was linear algebra, discrete mathematic and statistic-something. I did however use linear algebra just after while writing a simple collision/physics engine prototype and found that to be very fun.

I haven't had to rely a lot on math skills for a large portion of my career. For most "full-stack" stuff I've been involved with, it barely gets any higher than algebra. However, I've found math creep up though here and there, whether it be in understanding how projections worked in the mapping software I wrote, the computer graphics code I assisted with, and also in my routing algorithms for traffic flow.

Nowadays my lack of knowledge is most apparent in studying machine learning. There have been some very high level concepts employed, at least for me: Jacobian matrices, partial derivatives, tensors, etc. I've been able to fake that for a while, the algorithms get abstracted in the libraries. Yet the abstraction obscures a real understanding for me in how they work.

I'm in a similar situation, not getting much math in college while pursuing an unrelated degree and only teaching myself programming later. I've subsequently addressed my math deficit through extension courses at local universities, Coursera and Udacity MOOCs, Khan Academy, etc.

There two areas where I've felt the need for advanced math most keenly during my software development career are: 1) Similarity scoring in information retrieval and recommendation engines. 2) DSP.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com