"Got a chance to reboot my education, which was something I really needed to do. I had a professor in my freshman year of college who showed me that my mind could do math. And from there, I took charge."
How important do we think Maths education is?
How important do we think Maths education is?
If I consider the math courses I took in college undergrad (I was a C-S major) there are some that are useful in everyday day life like pre-Calc (aka. algebra + trig) when I build a new deck or figure out how much grass seed to buy. Others courses such as Calc I and II are useful in understanding the issues and trends around me, both business and political. But the vast majority are valuable to me every day as I work on systems software: Mathematical Logic and Discrete Math, Graph Theory, Linear Algebra with Differential Eq & Intro to the Theory of computation.
How can you not think Mathematics is important to tech?
It also stretches the mind. It's like saying weight training is useful if you're going to be a basketball player, even though there's no point in a game where you all stop and lift weights. :-)
When you learn how to prove a theorem you are learning how to debug a program.
What I was getting at (and my not have explained clearly in my first comment) was the importance of a teacher who could inspire confidence in the student, in this case Dave Winer.
Fundamentally, math == logic, and logic is the basis of all of mankind's post-Enlightenment gains in productivity, standard of living, etc.