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Comment by dfranke | Hacker News Reader

Math is hard. I have about as much formal education in math as I do in CS (about to finish undergrad as a double major). Yet I can pick up nearly any CS research paper and breeze through it, but my eyes will glaze over at 90% of math research.

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I'm a CS major but by the time I'll graduate I'll have taken more math than CS courses (degree requirements are funny that way). I would tend to agree with you about the relative difficulty if CS and math but this could be partially a consequence of how it is taught. If some school was crazy enough to offer a "real" (see Dijkstra[1]) program that would compare more favorably.

But this sort of proves the original point. Since cs/programming has lower barriers to entry (cool new stuff is still "easy") there are many more opportunities for young people.

[1] http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD10xx/EWD1036.html

I don't understand the relevance of your point about CS curricula. My comparison was with respect to my ability to read research papers written by professors, not to do classwork at my current level. I'm observing that math papers are much more difficult to understand and inferring that the state of the art in math is more complex than the state of the art in computer science.

It was partially a tangent prompted by your comment. I meant "the stuff CS people do and think about" not just homework or research. Through whatever accidents of history, practical concerns, or being a young field, the stuff CS people do tends to be easier than the stuff math people do, but that doesn't necessarily need to be the case.

Yes, math is hard and successful academics in the field are super smart. And yes, mathematical ability declines with age.

However, I don't see that math is really all that important for 99% of web 2.0 startups.

I don't think the OP meant specifically that math is important, just that the same energy that makes young people better at math also makes them better at startups.

Very few people are good at math. You need more than energy and enthusiasm to succeed in that field.

Anyway, older people bring critical skills to a startup such as creativity, which can improve over time as you try and observe all sorts of ideas.

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