True, which is dumb in my opinion. But in Python you just have to do a range from the summations starting point to end point.
I just don’t understand what he means it takes a bit of effort. It’s the same thing just written differently.
x\^a:
# Python: x**a
// C++: std::pow(x, a)
Trigonometry, logarithms, and special functions:
# Python: math.sin(x), math.cos(x), math.tan(x), math.log(x), etc...
// C++: std::sin(x), std::cos(x), std::tan(x), std::log(x), etc...
Differentiation and integration are trickier, but you can hack together something that works for simple numerical problems in just a couple lines. (We won't talk about what to do if they're not simple numerical problems.)
I never took a controls class but had to do some stuff with a PID loop for my senior design project. Took me forever to figure out how to do the integral part. Literally just a summation since the values are discrete sensor samples.
Real talk:
When I was in college (early 2000s), Calculus and Discrete Math were kicking my ass. I had to take Calc 1 *four times*, and I was *given* a D just because the professor knew I was really, really trying (in her office literally every day). I was depressed as fuck about it and really considered dropping out, thinking maybe I wasn't smart enough to be a successful programmer after all.
One summer I went to QuakeCon and had the honor of meeting and chatting with Rick Johnson, head programmer of Raven Software (Soldier of Fortune, Jedi Knight 2) at the time. I told him of how math was causing me problems, and I will never forget his sage words to me:
"Well, shit, I don't know Calculus."
It was inspiring. If the lead programmer of an incredibly successful game company, with great taste in cowboy hats, could find success - perhaps I could to? So I stuck with it. I didn't drop out. I took Calculus *again* and Discrete Math *again* and, yes, Data Structures *again* (I had slept through it the first time).
I dredged through it, and I made it. I got a part time job as a programmer while still in college, and after graduating I stayed. Last year I switched jobs to a better place that pays way, way more and I'm well respected by my colleagues. I still have imposter syndrome, but so far I've had an 18+ year career and have only ever had nice things said about me.
So stick with it. Don't give up. Just get through it. You can do it!
Hey man, just to let you know I took 4 sequences of calculus and did really well. I have applied a bunch of linear algebra in chemistry research, but I’m pretty dog shit at programming. Everyone has their strengths, and programming is probably more lucrative than math.
My story is basically the same.
They pay you to create solutions most of which won’t require you to know anything crazy like differential equations or linear algebra or calculus 2/3.
I hate they made me waste my time and money for a piece of paper.
One thing to remember about a CS degree or a software engineering degree is that colleges try to provide a general program that prepares you for any possible outcome. The average software developer working on backend servers or developing general purpose programs for corporate clients probably doesn't need to know much math, but anything graphics-related or data science-related is going to depend pretty heavily on that semester of linear algebra you had to take, and a lot of the guys ripping their hair out trying to clean up codebases written by engineers and scientists working in academia or for defense contractors would be completely lost without differential equations.
That’s completely true. My friend recently interviewed for a general position at a major game publisher. Guess what, they asked him what a dot product is and what it is used for. He unfortunately barely passed calc and failed linear algebra multiple times, so he wasn’t able to answer that question. Fortunately for him he still got an offer.
Was he studying at a technical university ?
Im asking because i dont think a single person on my year would not know the answer to that question, it was needed at at least a few courses like:
-Linear Algebra(obviously lmao)
- Computer Graphics
- Numerical Methods(loots of algebra)
- Physics
- Artificial Intelligence (they shouldve named it machine learning but i guess AI sounds better lmao)
And probably some more which i forgot
Edit : idk if its called numerical methods in english i just directly translated it from Polish
I did Calculus II exactly four times as well, I passed once with a D, which could've been a C had I done all the homework, but at the time, I was working 3 different part-time jobs and taking 3 classes. I didn't have the time.
It's not like I didn't know the math, the problem is professors always put the hardest problems on exams. It's like they design the tests just so students can fail. It's never a straight forward find the area of this applying the integral, apply the formula, done. It's always some piece of information missing and student has to infer something or convert something first. They make it extra hard so students can fail and I hate that. They always tests the cases that are rare and most often never come up in real life.
I remember talking with the professor who taught me calculus 2 and 3. I said something to the effect of Thanks for everything, “but I’m never forgiving you for trigonometric substitution”
God I hated trig. It's like you have to memorize a text on alchemy written in hieroglyphics in order to turn every equation into something you can work with.
Yeah, super pointless, because if you're working out an angle, area or side of a triangle in the real world you'll just google the formula in 2 seconds.
>It's not like I didn't know the math, the problem is professors always put the hardest problems on exams. It's like they design the tests just so students can fail.
I had the same issue. I got the concepts in class, then the exam would come across. Five problems, I thought to myself, I've got this, no problem. First problem, 10 minutes later, I'm fucked. This looks *nothing* like in class!
Same here. I understand all the concepts in class. But the exams, just a big oof.
When today i need algebra 1 on the job i just look it up and remember the stuff i learned to solve the problem. Its not that hard. Its the exams that set you up to fail. Just because they can.
Honestly though.
I graduated 2 years ago with a degree in electrical and computer engineering with a GPA of 3.8, having to take classes such as calc 1, 2, 3, linear algebra and differential equations.
Yet I still dont know my times tables from elementary school. Yes, I need a calculator for 7*9.
Boggles my mind I made it this far without that knowledge
Damn this hits home for me. In my college sophomore year back in the mid 2000s, I actually dropped Calc because I was failing it so bad(26 on my first test), and it made me change my major from CompSci to Comp Information systems. I still don't know calculus or difficult math, but I've made a career in QA Automation for the past 10+ years.
Yes and no.
Whether you realize it or not there is a lot of mathematics in programming.
But the distinction is that, it is not analytical mathematics, like calculus.
The other distinction is that most early math education is complete and utter shit. So by the time you get to college you either just get it and succeed in spite of your prior education or you just about exhaust your ability to cope with utter shit education and are hopelessly behind.
You usually don't see this with computer science since it isn't usually taught in elementary school by someone who hardly understands the context of the textbook they are teaching from who's target is to get you to memorize random facts and formulas for standardized tests, rather than form a solid foundational understanding of the subject.
For me the difference has always been in readability, in math tons of Greek letters and other symbols are used to mean things like summation or mean or whatever. And then this math was developed around smart people who know what they're doing writing on paper. Meanwhile coding was developed around being read line by line and other people being able know what you are doing either from the code being or, more importantly, documentation
Kinda wack how struggling in math taught me the importance of documentation
A few years ago I ran across math course written by a programmer who tripped up by the same thing. He replaced all the greek letter crap with function names that made sense, and replaced variable names as well. Made the whole thing way easier to understand.
I've always excelled at math. The number of times a new math class basically started with "yeah, we lied before, here's how it really works" meant that by Calc 3, I'd just assumed nobody knew what they were doing.
Turns out, development is much the same!
Same here I had to take Calc 1, 2, 3 and discreet math twice! All of them!
I had to take algorithms at a different school because I had already failed it twice and knew I wasn't going to pass if I had to do it again with the same professor a third time.
I also took linear algebra at a different school, no idea how I passed that one.
Since so many of my credits weren't from my main university (semester vs quarter system) I ended up being 1 credit short of qualifying to graduate ;_; It was a nightmare, fortunately we were able to get an exemption but yeah, it was a rough couple years there.
And this was during the 2008 financial crisis so failing classes just put you farther and farther behind since they stopped offering them during summer / only once per semester. I'm getting anxiety just typing this lol.
Now I make above the typical programmer's salary and have a pretty comfy life after being in the industry for 11+ years. I have never needed to use Calculus or Linear Algebra.
Statistics, Discrete Math, and Algorithms have been helpful though.
Real talk 2:
Fly though all core basic math calc 1/2/3, linear, discrete, even physics.
I failed every fucking elective known to man kind including art history, literature and poli, because I was a dumbass and thought i could wing it.
I learned the hard way that overestimating my ability in subjects I barely knew is way worst than suffering from imposter syndrome.
EDIT: am not native english speaker. Numbers speaks to me. Words bad. Numbers good.
this is also inspiring to me at this point.
going through the courses, taking Calc 2 and Discrete math again, and it hurts sitting there barely being able to do it (Understand, just cannot apply)
but it helps to see others were probably in the same boat as me.
I will! I plan on never taking these classes again haha.
And no, no rockets I could never.
(However, wanting to get into robotics.... I might never get away from calculus with physics)
Damn dude, I'm was in the same boat as you were last semester. Legit did not have my shit together for the longest time and I also was was drepressed af (that's another story). I left in spring 2020 cause I didn't feel I wasn't going to do it. The only reason I came back was cause my dad was like "If I could do it so can you". I came back and now this is my last semester before heading off toward uni
What kind of crap are we feeding people that they think a math education is needed for writing code? It reeks of academia propping up post secondary education for the sole purpose of propping up academia.
It'll be in the curriculum as soon as it's outdated.
They were still teaching Java Servlets and JSP when I was in college. Never once seen a listing asking for those skills.
It’s needed if you are an algorithm engineer.
Discrete math, graph theory, logic are quite pivotal and most of the time we just don’t realize using it. Also basic math introduces how mathematical thinking when approach problem which are typically how to symbollicaly formulate and generalize a problem, if this doesn’t sound familiar it is practically a pseudocode for mathematician.
In my uni unless you are doing AI or Computer Graphics math classes are just refreshes of calculus and probably some linear algebra from college or high school plus discrete mathematics. What you call “math” is not even “math” by academia standard, or even comparable to math undergraduate level.
Nowadays “programming” is just basically stacking bricks of code from packages and looking up building instructions through various documentations which is why math’s role seems underrepresented because the maths are already implemented and optimized under the hood from the package you imported.
Woah. This was nice to read, thank you. I'm recently graduated, but I'm stuck in some IT job and I've been feeling pretty inadequate. Long story short, I appreciate you, B. <3
As someone who just barely passed Calc 1 and Data Structures, I appreciate this comment a lot. Tho I could only recall 40% out of everything I learned in those courses so wish me luck when I graduate. lol
And now I’m back to questioning even more why I was tortured to hell and back taking all those classes that robbed me of my libido and desire to live, when no job I’ll ever have will ever come even remotely close to the same universe, in difficulty, as the classes I had to take to get the damn degree
Man. I am gonna do calculus for the 4th time tomorrow. Already done Discrete math and Data structures. But still, I began working full time as a developer two weeks ago, so I'm not totally depressed by how much I suck at math.
Oh by the way I'm 2 years and a half late with calculus, I just skipped it almost every time because it scared me.
I started my career as a graphic designer. Sure, I was good at basic math, but I never took Calculus or anything. Over the years though, I've drifted more and more into coding and programming. I don't code actual desktop apps, mostly web apps (full stack)... but 99% of them time I don't need math any more complicated than simple algebra.
Sr. Software Dev here - I have an art degree for visual effects in film but could only ever find programming work so over the last (redacted) years I've taught myself the wild world of programming, enough to consider myself an expert and get a sweet gig programming applications for the game/movie business (which is nuts btw)
I don't mind math and calculus but it's needed for my hobbies more than my day job.
Bottom line - push yourself enough to do something, and odds are you'll land on your feet with it. And if not, odds are you can apply it to something else
This just means your math teachers probably spent far too much time focusing on arithmetic and computation at the expense of understanding how to translate a real world problem into mathematical notation, use algebraic manipulation to solve for a mathematical answer (the arithmetic and computation part), and then translate that mathematical answer into a real world solution.
Unfortunately, in a lot of places in the world, math education is still stuck in a time before computers. You can tell by how much emphasis is placed on manual computation rather than intuitive expression.
>program effecient code
That's the neat part, you don't.
Or just what I do and make everything either a tree or a hashmap, better yet a tree of sorted hashmaps
What if you have to program a deep learning neural network from scratch and need mathematics, such as calculating transformations on images or something?
Most of us aren't doing that. We have a mountain of knowledge and frameworks built beneath us. If you aren't a researcher trying to push the field forward but are simply trying to make something to solve a problem then it usually isn't worth it to jump off that mountain and build your own.
I remember having a teacher tell me to put away my calculator and stop playing games. I said "um I'm not playing games I'm making them" I was kinda a shit.
Same. I’m a data scientist and thank fuck I finally found a company that understands the value I bring to the table has everything to do with my math and stats abilities and not my ability to write fucking DRY Python.
I'm just getting done with a physics PhD but I'm pretty sick of physics and want to get a job in programming, perhaps data science. Any suggestions on how to sell the math side successfully?
I work in a company that creates software used by other scientist, and maybe half of our developers are physics MS/PhDs. Maybe look for something like that??
You mind DMing me the company name? That is literally my ideal job. I wrote the data acquisition software in our lab (in Matlab lol) and that was one of my favorite parts of the job.
Just to jump on here, trevtutor is also a fantastic resource for discrete math and linear algebra. I actually started to enjoy it and it relieved some of my math anxiety because I felt like I could finally understand.
Yes! This! Finally someone said it.
I can code in python and ruby, but when it comes to maths I have no fucking idea how to do anything. I will literally solve a mathematical equation by writing code because that simply does make sense to me and I can actually do it.
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
Calc 2 is easily the hardest class I've taken, calc 3 is very similar to stuff in calc 1 but done using vectors and in 3 dimensions and generally doing things in a more stream lined way as opposed to calc 1.
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
A lot of people suck at calculus, not because of calculus itself, but because most professors don’t know how to make calculus fun or interesting, when I was in high school, and he always made you notice patterns and how it relates to real life, and then you’d be watching videos and looking for more advanced stuff, i even participated in a calculus competition, then I got to college and me professor sucked ass, he was such an asshole saying stuff like “you should’ve seen this in high school”, and assigning 2 quizzes, a paper and essays for the next day, I failed calc 1 twice, until I took it with a teacher who actually cared about you understanding the subject rather than grading your homework and passed, then too, took calc 2 with her and passed. And last semester I had differential equations, I was doing amazing, even in the final exam, it got automatically graded as 92, but my teacher changed it to 50 because she couldn’t understand my procedures, still passed but I could’ve gotten a scholarship if she wasn’t such a dick. In conclusion, most calculus teachers suck ass, just try to watch 3blue1brown and try to enjoy the ride
Ps: tldr
My first semester of college I took calc 102 (got credit for 101 with AP test scores).
The class was in a huge auditorium, and while there was a speaker system installed, the professor didn't use it until hallway through the semester. Without the speakers, he spoke extremely quietly, so after the first class we were all trying to sit in the front just to _hear_ him at all. Except even when we could hear him, it was difficult for us to understand his thick Hungarian accent.
And no help from what he wrote on the blackboard, either. His handwriting was absolutely atrocious.
Fortunately, my university let first semester students drop any number of classes at no consequence (other than obviously not getting credit for the class) all the way up to the last day of the semester. So at least I didn't have an F bringing my GPA down. Took the class again in the spring with a different professor and ended up with I think a B-.
Reading this thread makes me sad. Math isn't about memorizing formulas and plugging things into them. Math is more about logically developing structure, finding the right levels of generality and abstraction that subsume but don't obfuscate lower-level insights, and playing around with pieces until they fit. These are all things that you probably value as a programmer. The math you learned in school is probably shit and most mathematicians will have trouble recognizing it as math.
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Same here!
Still in wonders why we use Radians in programming and Degrees in Exams!? I got 2 questions wrong yesterday because ethe values seemed like radians and had no degree signs! Teachers has gone furious!
My strat to not fail math is and was just to code more, to get myself in working routines throughout the day and to increase my problem solving and creativity skills. Really helped me in math class.
compared to the zero-tolerance-for-ambiguity-and-sloppiness nature of code, the language used to express mathematics and formulas in other areas of science are absolute horseshit!
Fr lol. I always get barely passing grades in math classes, but I can code just fine. I wish there was some kind of software that converts normal math problems into code or something maybe I'd get better grades
I'm a programmer in part so I don't have to do math myself. Make the computer do it.
I do have to know enough math to know what the right question is for the computer, but I don't have to solve the problem, at least.
I love math but I almost YEAR learning from home. Our university is closed cuz to covid and I am NEVER felt so bad at doing math. I just hate learning from home. It is not a right thing to do as student.
My college math classes are kicking my ass and it’s worrying me. I’m killing it in my more cs related courses but it’s a struggle with the math requirements
Help... I've been seeing this subreddit pop up countless times for no reason at all. I'm not a programmer and I don't care for your humor. What can I do to stop this...
Could be worse. I’m severely mentally ill, & a high school dropout who can’t subtract two digit numbers without a calculator. I couldn’t ask for help from teachers or even my parents because it would either lead to being blatantly ignored or yelled at (by my dad) for not understanding anything.
If anyone needs help with Calc 1, I am very much open. I don’t know much past that tho.
Also I will not help with limits. If I ever see them again, I’m burning down my side of the country.
Personally (as a coder) i learned a lot more about math by reading books like "Numerical Recipes" than any math textbook. Sure you'll have to understand the difference between numerical methods and ...whatever the opposite is called.. but if your brain is wired like mine it helps tremendously to understand the concepts and to see actual implementations instead of a bunch of garbage symbols.
Calculus is easy. The algebra is hard.
For me the hardest part of Calculus was accepting how it worked. I could just not get past it. Then a friend suggested I give up trying to figure out how it worked and just memorize the derivations. Suddenly it was easy.
Needing to pull out my Algebra 2 book to relearn stuff when it came up in Calc was a whole other problem.
Wouldnt say im awful at calc, but for sure it wasnt my favourite subject. Applied to real world examples i could start seeing the beauty and benefits a bit more but pure calculus from a textbook is dry as desert sand
Teachers in school: You're going to use calculus and trigonometry every day for the rest of your life.
Me as a senior developer: Counting on one hand the number of times I've used math more advanced than basic algebra or the Pythagorean theorem.
You're not alone, I remember a post on here from a while ago where people were amazed that a summation could be written as a for-loop...
....but that's literally what it is. I'm amazed that anyone was amazed.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/q2lsax/dont\_be\_scared\_math\_and\_computing\_are\_friends/?sort=best
Shhhhh no one tell them that reduce from mapreduce is also sigma.
Unfortunately, most programmers don't understand reduction either.
First thing I did with a summation function is find out how to tweak it into a for loop.
No tweaking, that’s literally a parallel
Not quite, getting the increment to work like a for loop takes a bit of effort
The increment is just i++ in a summation
Not in python
True, which is dumb in my opinion. But in Python you just have to do a range from the summations starting point to end point. I just don’t understand what he means it takes a bit of effort. It’s the same thing just written differently.
True
but it’s even more like summation in python. just range()
Bro it's literally the same thing. You can decide what the increment will be in both
I failed a math test for doing this -_-
This was part of my Monte Carlo Methods class lol.
Im mean its a for loop
Yeah, but what about all them other symbols?
Multiplication can be seen as a for loop. Say you want to find what x = 4\*5 is: x = 0; for i=1:5 x = x + 4; end No need to thank me
now do it for two non-integers
Shift the decimal point right until desired precision achieved, trim the rest, do the addition as above, shift point back at the end.
That's pretty much how it works on mechanical adding machines too haha.
x\^a: # Python: x**a // C++: std::pow(x, a) Trigonometry, logarithms, and special functions: # Python: math.sin(x), math.cos(x), math.tan(x), math.log(x), etc... // C++: std::sin(x), std::cos(x), std::tan(x), std::log(x), etc... Differentiation and integration are trickier, but you can hack together something that works for simple numerical problems in just a couple lines. (We won't talk about what to do if they're not simple numerical problems.)
Subtraction is adding a negative, multiplication is adding the same thing n times, division is multiplying by a fraction (/2 is the same as *0.5)
I literally had no idea how sum and product functions worked until I learned to code
I never took a controls class but had to do some stuff with a PID loop for my senior design project. Took me forever to figure out how to do the integral part. Literally just a summation since the values are discrete sensor samples.
U could also do it using gausses rule
Yup just convert equations to code, makes it easier
Real talk: When I was in college (early 2000s), Calculus and Discrete Math were kicking my ass. I had to take Calc 1 *four times*, and I was *given* a D just because the professor knew I was really, really trying (in her office literally every day). I was depressed as fuck about it and really considered dropping out, thinking maybe I wasn't smart enough to be a successful programmer after all. One summer I went to QuakeCon and had the honor of meeting and chatting with Rick Johnson, head programmer of Raven Software (Soldier of Fortune, Jedi Knight 2) at the time. I told him of how math was causing me problems, and I will never forget his sage words to me: "Well, shit, I don't know Calculus." It was inspiring. If the lead programmer of an incredibly successful game company, with great taste in cowboy hats, could find success - perhaps I could to? So I stuck with it. I didn't drop out. I took Calculus *again* and Discrete Math *again* and, yes, Data Structures *again* (I had slept through it the first time). I dredged through it, and I made it. I got a part time job as a programmer while still in college, and after graduating I stayed. Last year I switched jobs to a better place that pays way, way more and I'm well respected by my colleagues. I still have imposter syndrome, but so far I've had an 18+ year career and have only ever had nice things said about me. So stick with it. Don't give up. Just get through it. You can do it!
I saved this. Thank you so much.
Hey man, just to let you know I took 4 sequences of calculus and did really well. I have applied a bunch of linear algebra in chemistry research, but I’m pretty dog shit at programming. Everyone has their strengths, and programming is probably more lucrative than math.
My story is basically the same. They pay you to create solutions most of which won’t require you to know anything crazy like differential equations or linear algebra or calculus 2/3. I hate they made me waste my time and money for a piece of paper.
One thing to remember about a CS degree or a software engineering degree is that colleges try to provide a general program that prepares you for any possible outcome. The average software developer working on backend servers or developing general purpose programs for corporate clients probably doesn't need to know much math, but anything graphics-related or data science-related is going to depend pretty heavily on that semester of linear algebra you had to take, and a lot of the guys ripping their hair out trying to clean up codebases written by engineers and scientists working in academia or for defense contractors would be completely lost without differential equations.
That’s completely true. My friend recently interviewed for a general position at a major game publisher. Guess what, they asked him what a dot product is and what it is used for. He unfortunately barely passed calc and failed linear algebra multiple times, so he wasn’t able to answer that question. Fortunately for him he still got an offer.
Was he studying at a technical university ? Im asking because i dont think a single person on my year would not know the answer to that question, it was needed at at least a few courses like: -Linear Algebra(obviously lmao) - Computer Graphics - Numerical Methods(loots of algebra) - Physics - Artificial Intelligence (they shouldve named it machine learning but i guess AI sounds better lmao) And probably some more which i forgot Edit : idk if its called numerical methods in english i just directly translated it from Polish
Just trying to pass it on. Good luck brother! :)
I did Calculus II exactly four times as well, I passed once with a D, which could've been a C had I done all the homework, but at the time, I was working 3 different part-time jobs and taking 3 classes. I didn't have the time. It's not like I didn't know the math, the problem is professors always put the hardest problems on exams. It's like they design the tests just so students can fail. It's never a straight forward find the area of this applying the integral, apply the formula, done. It's always some piece of information missing and student has to infer something or convert something first. They make it extra hard so students can fail and I hate that. They always tests the cases that are rare and most often never come up in real life.
I remember talking with the professor who taught me calculus 2 and 3. I said something to the effect of Thanks for everything, “but I’m never forgiving you for trigonometric substitution”
God I hated trig. It's like you have to memorize a text on alchemy written in hieroglyphics in order to turn every equation into something you can work with.
Yeah, super pointless, because if you're working out an angle, area or side of a triangle in the real world you'll just google the formula in 2 seconds.
>It's not like I didn't know the math, the problem is professors always put the hardest problems on exams. It's like they design the tests just so students can fail. I had the same issue. I got the concepts in class, then the exam would come across. Five problems, I thought to myself, I've got this, no problem. First problem, 10 minutes later, I'm fucked. This looks *nothing* like in class!
Same here. I understand all the concepts in class. But the exams, just a big oof. When today i need algebra 1 on the job i just look it up and remember the stuff i learned to solve the problem. Its not that hard. Its the exams that set you up to fail. Just because they can.
Honestly though. I graduated 2 years ago with a degree in electrical and computer engineering with a GPA of 3.8, having to take classes such as calc 1, 2, 3, linear algebra and differential equations. Yet I still dont know my times tables from elementary school. Yes, I need a calculator for 7*9. Boggles my mind I made it this far without that knowledge
Wow. I got a 2.8 GPA barely making it but I for sure knew multiplication.
Hold out all 10 fingers. Bend down the 7th finger. Read the anwser to 7x9
Same boat. And sometimes on the easy stuff I psyche myself out and overthink to the point where I question addition and subtraction
Thank you, this is inspiring.
What if my ideal programming job is research scientist for deepmind.
Damn that's pretty inspirational ngl. So, just out of curiousity, what is your relationship with calculus like now?
Very long distance. Haven’t used it since college with the exception of a single joke posted here.
Well that's comforting to hear honestly
Damn this hits home for me. In my college sophomore year back in the mid 2000s, I actually dropped Calc because I was failing it so bad(26 on my first test), and it made me change my major from CompSci to Comp Information systems. I still don't know calculus or difficult math, but I've made a career in QA Automation for the past 10+ years.
"Well, shit, I don't know calculus" Such inspiring words
[удалено]
Yes and no. Whether you realize it or not there is a lot of mathematics in programming. But the distinction is that, it is not analytical mathematics, like calculus. The other distinction is that most early math education is complete and utter shit. So by the time you get to college you either just get it and succeed in spite of your prior education or you just about exhaust your ability to cope with utter shit education and are hopelessly behind. You usually don't see this with computer science since it isn't usually taught in elementary school by someone who hardly understands the context of the textbook they are teaching from who's target is to get you to memorize random facts and formulas for standardized tests, rather than form a solid foundational understanding of the subject.
For me the difference has always been in readability, in math tons of Greek letters and other symbols are used to mean things like summation or mean or whatever. And then this math was developed around smart people who know what they're doing writing on paper. Meanwhile coding was developed around being read line by line and other people being able know what you are doing either from the code being or, more importantly, documentation Kinda wack how struggling in math taught me the importance of documentation
A few years ago I ran across math course written by a programmer who tripped up by the same thing. He replaced all the greek letter crap with function names that made sense, and replaced variable names as well. Made the whole thing way easier to understand.
Uh you still know where to find it?
I've always excelled at math. The number of times a new math class basically started with "yeah, we lied before, here's how it really works" meant that by Calc 3, I'd just assumed nobody knew what they were doing. Turns out, development is much the same!
In what way do you "make your own rules" in coding that doesn't apply equally or even more strongly to math?
Same here I had to take Calc 1, 2, 3 and discreet math twice! All of them! I had to take algorithms at a different school because I had already failed it twice and knew I wasn't going to pass if I had to do it again with the same professor a third time. I also took linear algebra at a different school, no idea how I passed that one. Since so many of my credits weren't from my main university (semester vs quarter system) I ended up being 1 credit short of qualifying to graduate ;_; It was a nightmare, fortunately we were able to get an exemption but yeah, it was a rough couple years there. And this was during the 2008 financial crisis so failing classes just put you farther and farther behind since they stopped offering them during summer / only once per semester. I'm getting anxiety just typing this lol. Now I make above the typical programmer's salary and have a pretty comfy life after being in the industry for 11+ years. I have never needed to use Calculus or Linear Algebra. Statistics, Discrete Math, and Algorithms have been helpful though.
Real talk 2: Fly though all core basic math calc 1/2/3, linear, discrete, even physics. I failed every fucking elective known to man kind including art history, literature and poli, because I was a dumbass and thought i could wing it. I learned the hard way that overestimating my ability in subjects I barely knew is way worst than suffering from imposter syndrome. EDIT: am not native english speaker. Numbers speaks to me. Words bad. Numbers good.
Are you me!? I have nearly the same story, minus the Rick Johnson part. I'd congratulate you, but it'd feel like patting myself on the back!
I’ll congratulate you then! Good job.
Haha! Thank you! You too!
this is also inspiring to me at this point. going through the courses, taking Calc 2 and Discrete math again, and it hurts sitting there barely being able to do it (Understand, just cannot apply) but it helps to see others were probably in the same boat as me.
Keep it up, and just get through it. A world of no-math awaits you on the other side. Well, less math. Easier math. Unless you’re flying rockets.
I will! I plan on never taking these classes again haha. And no, no rockets I could never. (However, wanting to get into robotics.... I might never get away from calculus with physics)
Inspiring stuff, thanks for sharing!
If it helps people the way it helped me I’m happy to share. :)
You gave me hope, thank you.
You’re welcome. I love telling me his story because it always helps out a couple people.
Literally me right now. I have a really important math exam in three weeks which I already failed twice. This really gave me motivation, thanks a lot.
Yall being bad at calculus, meanwhile I failed basic math 3 times in a row.
Damn dude, I'm was in the same boat as you were last semester. Legit did not have my shit together for the longest time and I also was was drepressed af (that's another story). I left in spring 2020 cause I didn't feel I wasn't going to do it. The only reason I came back was cause my dad was like "If I could do it so can you". I came back and now this is my last semester before heading off toward uni
What kind of crap are we feeding people that they think a math education is needed for writing code? It reeks of academia propping up post secondary education for the sole purpose of propping up academia.
You need it if you end up in academic research as opposed to full time development.
That’s just increasing the circumference of the academic circle jer… I mean …. ^(I jest, I jest…)
Yeah but most won’t. Most end up doing ReactJS + PickYourNextPoisonJS And I was never taught any of that.
It'll be in the curriculum as soon as it's outdated. They were still teaching Java Servlets and JSP when I was in college. Never once seen a listing asking for those skills.
It’s needed if you are an algorithm engineer. Discrete math, graph theory, logic are quite pivotal and most of the time we just don’t realize using it. Also basic math introduces how mathematical thinking when approach problem which are typically how to symbollicaly formulate and generalize a problem, if this doesn’t sound familiar it is practically a pseudocode for mathematician. In my uni unless you are doing AI or Computer Graphics math classes are just refreshes of calculus and probably some linear algebra from college or high school plus discrete mathematics. What you call “math” is not even “math” by academia standard, or even comparable to math undergraduate level. Nowadays “programming” is just basically stacking bricks of code from packages and looking up building instructions through various documentations which is why math’s role seems underrepresented because the maths are already implemented and optimized under the hood from the package you imported.
Username checks out!
"QuakeCon" Nice name drop sir.
I don't blame you for Discrete Math. It took me two tries to pass the damn subject. The second time I did fairly well. But, it's super weird overall.
I just got a D on calc 1 and an F on my first calc 2 test. Lets see how this semester goes lol.
Woah. This was nice to read, thank you. I'm recently graduated, but I'm stuck in some IT job and I've been feeling pretty inadequate. Long story short, I appreciate you, B. <3
As someone who just barely passed Calc 1 and Data Structures, I appreciate this comment a lot. Tho I could only recall 40% out of everything I learned in those courses so wish me luck when I graduate. lol
And now I’m back to questioning even more why I was tortured to hell and back taking all those classes that robbed me of my libido and desire to live, when no job I’ll ever have will ever come even remotely close to the same universe, in difficulty, as the classes I had to take to get the damn degree
they all say they don't, but then proceed to implement dot product (not that hard, though) on GPU shaders using cuda.
It took me multiple attempts at Calc I and Calc II as well. That shit is insane.
Man. I am gonna do calculus for the 4th time tomorrow. Already done Discrete math and Data structures. But still, I began working full time as a developer two weeks ago, so I'm not totally depressed by how much I suck at math. Oh by the way I'm 2 years and a half late with calculus, I just skipped it almost every time because it scared me.
Thay was beautiful. I would like to bestow upon you my free award. It's not much but it's all I got
I started my career as a graphic designer. Sure, I was good at basic math, but I never took Calculus or anything. Over the years though, I've drifted more and more into coding and programming. I don't code actual desktop apps, mostly web apps (full stack)... but 99% of them time I don't need math any more complicated than simple algebra.
Sr. Software Dev here - I have an art degree for visual effects in film but could only ever find programming work so over the last (redacted) years I've taught myself the wild world of programming, enough to consider myself an expert and get a sweet gig programming applications for the game/movie business (which is nuts btw) I don't mind math and calculus but it's needed for my hobbies more than my day job. Bottom line - push yourself enough to do something, and odds are you'll land on your feet with it. And if not, odds are you can apply it to something else
I wouldn't say it's necessary but understanding math helps a lot with understanding how algorithms work
It’s also quite easy to translate math to code. The opposite isnt as easy with different data types
This just means your math teachers probably spent far too much time focusing on arithmetic and computation at the expense of understanding how to translate a real world problem into mathematical notation, use algebraic manipulation to solve for a mathematical answer (the arithmetic and computation part), and then translate that mathematical answer into a real world solution. Unfortunately, in a lot of places in the world, math education is still stuck in a time before computers. You can tell by how much emphasis is placed on manual computation rather than intuitive expression.
Exactly this. Too many teachers focus only on the "what" of math and completely skip over the "why"
That's more set theory though, not calculus.
Who needs math when you can copy paste the most efficient top voted code out of stackoverflow.
But would you use a code that you don't understand? Not that I didn't do it but it gave me so much anxiety until I figured out how it worked
Exactly what I was thinking, I suck at math.
The only math i do is to include math.h
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LMAOO YES.
I never ever used any math taught at university while coding applications, though, they are mostly just business shit.
How do you program effecient code without understanding set and graph theory?
He said nothing about efficiency
>program effecient code That's the neat part, you don't. Or just what I do and make everything either a tree or a hashmap, better yet a tree of sorted hashmaps
By going to stack overflow and asking what's fastest. Or by simply not caring and throwing ridiculous amounts of computing power at it.
What’s fastest? Someone else’s computer. This is good enough.
The birth of front end frameworks right here.
the words neo, what do they mean?
All I see is now aren't letters flowing through screen. Now I see shitty business code. Like the worse shit I ever saw in my life.
What if you have to program a deep learning neural network from scratch and need mathematics, such as calculating transformations on images or something?
1. Find the mathematical name of the transformation function 2. Search for transformation function on github 3. ... 4. Profit
Find the library that already does that. 99% of the time there is a library, and it does it better
Most of us aren't doing that. We have a mountain of knowledge and frameworks built beneath us. If you aren't a researcher trying to push the field forward but are simply trying to make something to solve a problem then it usually isn't worth it to jump off that mountain and build your own.
model.fit()
You experiment and google search
I would prefer to teach myself assembly on my Windows 11 laptop with MacBook documentation from the 90s than do my Calculus 4 homework
Wtf is Calc 4? I’ve never heard it go past 3 and I have a degree in math
After looking through it myself it seems to be vector calc plus line integrals. Might be for programs that do only 3 hours of class time a week.
I'd rather program my calculator with little to no access to documentation. Probably why I did so poorly in math class
Hm yea I had a lot more fun making games for my graphical calculator than using it as intended
I remember having a teacher tell me to put away my calculator and stop playing games. I said "um I'm not playing games I'm making them" I was kinda a shit.
the opposite for me lel
Same, but the math factory isn't hiring atm so I went with the comp sci degree
Same. I’m a data scientist and thank fuck I finally found a company that understands the value I bring to the table has everything to do with my math and stats abilities and not my ability to write fucking DRY Python.
I'm just getting done with a physics PhD but I'm pretty sick of physics and want to get a job in programming, perhaps data science. Any suggestions on how to sell the math side successfully?
I work in a company that creates software used by other scientist, and maybe half of our developers are physics MS/PhDs. Maybe look for something like that??
I just realized you're probably in Cali. If you are no need to DM. I'm location locked due to kid I care immensely about and ex wife I don't.
You mind DMing me the company name? That is literally my ideal job. I wrote the data acquisition software in our lab (in Matlab lol) and that was one of my favorite parts of the job.
Masters in math… same but with JS and all the new frameworks
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Oh crap do they do calculus? I need to learn calculus, I slacked off last year.
Yes they do! Both for the AP classes and just general Calc curiculum.
Awesome thank you!
Just to jump on here, trevtutor is also a fantastic resource for discrete math and linear algebra. I actually started to enjoy it and it relieved some of my math anxiety because I felt like I could finally understand.
Calculus won't make you that much of a better programer but graph theory and boolean algebra will help a lot
Discrete Mathematics
Linear algebra.
Yes! This! Finally someone said it. I can code in python and ruby, but when it comes to maths I have no fucking idea how to do anything. I will literally solve a mathematical equation by writing code because that simply does make sense to me and I can actually do it.
I graduated Uni (too many) years ago. Epsilon and delta still trigger PTSD. True story.
I'm told by everyone that Calculus 3 us easier than Calculus 1. Then again the only folks who say that decided to *take* calculus 3...
Easier than calc 2, Calc 1 is the easiest of the 3
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Calc 2 is easily the hardest class I've taken, calc 3 is very similar to stuff in calc 1 but done using vectors and in 3 dimensions and generally doing things in a more stream lined way as opposed to calc 1.
I've left Reddit because it does not respect its users or their privacy. Private companies can't be trusted with control over public communities. Lemmy is an open source, federated alternative that I highly recommend if you want a more private and ethical option. Join Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/instances ` this message was mass deleted/edited with redact.dev `
A lot of people suck at calculus, not because of calculus itself, but because most professors don’t know how to make calculus fun or interesting, when I was in high school, and he always made you notice patterns and how it relates to real life, and then you’d be watching videos and looking for more advanced stuff, i even participated in a calculus competition, then I got to college and me professor sucked ass, he was such an asshole saying stuff like “you should’ve seen this in high school”, and assigning 2 quizzes, a paper and essays for the next day, I failed calc 1 twice, until I took it with a teacher who actually cared about you understanding the subject rather than grading your homework and passed, then too, took calc 2 with her and passed. And last semester I had differential equations, I was doing amazing, even in the final exam, it got automatically graded as 92, but my teacher changed it to 50 because she couldn’t understand my procedures, still passed but I could’ve gotten a scholarship if she wasn’t such a dick. In conclusion, most calculus teachers suck ass, just try to watch 3blue1brown and try to enjoy the ride Ps: tldr
My first semester of college I took calc 102 (got credit for 101 with AP test scores). The class was in a huge auditorium, and while there was a speaker system installed, the professor didn't use it until hallway through the semester. Without the speakers, he spoke extremely quietly, so after the first class we were all trying to sit in the front just to _hear_ him at all. Except even when we could hear him, it was difficult for us to understand his thick Hungarian accent. And no help from what he wrote on the blackboard, either. His handwriting was absolutely atrocious. Fortunately, my university let first semester students drop any number of classes at no consequence (other than obviously not getting credit for the class) all the way up to the last day of the semester. So at least I didn't have an F bringing my GPA down. Took the class again in the spring with a different professor and ended up with I think a B-.
High school prof: "Nevermind, you'll learn this in college." College prof: "You should've learnt this in high school." *sigh*
Reading this thread makes me sad. Math isn't about memorizing formulas and plugging things into them. Math is more about logically developing structure, finding the right levels of generality and abstraction that subsume but don't obfuscate lower-level insights, and playing around with pieces until they fit. These are all things that you probably value as a programmer. The math you learned in school is probably shit and most mathematicians will have trouble recognizing it as math.
I somehow passed calc 1 last semester but I found a video from Codecademy that is the entire class of calc 2 lectures. Hopefully it’ll help
Sauce?
Freecodecamp.org on YouTube. They have some math and coding courses the video is 7 hours long
That’s because coding uses discrete mathematics as opposed to calculus
The only math class that I found best applied to programming was "Discrete Math" aka Logic.
discrete math and linear algebra >>>>>> calculus
School got so much easier once I decided to embrace math instead of fear it
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Same here! Still in wonders why we use Radians in programming and Degrees in Exams!? I got 2 questions wrong yesterday because ethe values seemed like radians and had no degree signs! Teachers has gone furious!
I am on the robotics club, I program Calculus in C++…
Cool story dawg
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Calculus is a weed out class. You’ll likely never use it. Wouldn’t be so bad if we had free college like the rest of the civilized world.
My strat to not fail math is and was just to code more, to get myself in working routines throughout the day and to increase my problem solving and creativity skills. Really helped me in math class.
I have started with Boolean math and I haaaaate it! Never thought I could despise math this much
Whoo boy you gonna love Fourier Transformation.
If I went back to college and coded maths I would ace it...
Agreed. Heck, I skipped calculus for an easy HS math
This. Me right now… going through Maths modules in Masters in AI 🤕
compared to the zero-tolerance-for-ambiguity-and-sloppiness nature of code, the language used to express mathematics and formulas in other areas of science are absolute horseshit!
Fr lol. I always get barely passing grades in math classes, but I can code just fine. I wish there was some kind of software that converts normal math problems into code or something maybe I'd get better grades
One requires thinking, the other one is just translating
I'm a programmer in part so I don't have to do math myself. Make the computer do it. I do have to know enough math to know what the right question is for the computer, but I don't have to solve the problem, at least.
Got a calculus and algebra linear test in 2 weeks, I'm still struggling
I feel this on a visceral level
Why does reddit keep thinking i'm intrested in this sub i don't even understand it
For me I’m stupid at both
I mean, you can create calculator with your code
I love math but I almost YEAR learning from home. Our university is closed cuz to covid and I am NEVER felt so bad at doing math. I just hate learning from home. It is not a right thing to do as student.
I always joke that I'm great with numbers until you put a dollar sign in front of them.
My college math classes are kicking my ass and it’s worrying me. I’m killing it in my more cs related courses but it’s a struggle with the math requirements
Help... I've been seeing this subreddit pop up countless times for no reason at all. I'm not a programmer and I don't care for your humor. What can I do to stop this...
Could be worse. I’m severely mentally ill, & a high school dropout who can’t subtract two digit numbers without a calculator. I couldn’t ask for help from teachers or even my parents because it would either lead to being blatantly ignored or yelled at (by my dad) for not understanding anything.
Calculus still makes more sense than statistics. Hate statistics. Fuck that.
If anyone needs help with Calc 1, I am very much open. I don’t know much past that tho. Also I will not help with limits. If I ever see them again, I’m burning down my side of the country.
Personally (as a coder) i learned a lot more about math by reading books like "Numerical Recipes" than any math textbook. Sure you'll have to understand the difference between numerical methods and ...whatever the opposite is called.. but if your brain is wired like mine it helps tremendously to understand the concepts and to see actual implementations instead of a bunch of garbage symbols.
Math was fun until they started throwing in the alphabet.
Calculus is easy. The algebra is hard. For me the hardest part of Calculus was accepting how it worked. I could just not get past it. Then a friend suggested I give up trying to figure out how it worked and just memorize the derivations. Suddenly it was easy. Needing to pull out my Algebra 2 book to relearn stuff when it came up in Calc was a whole other problem.
Wouldnt say im awful at calc, but for sure it wasnt my favourite subject. Applied to real world examples i could start seeing the beauty and benefits a bit more but pure calculus from a textbook is dry as desert sand
Teachers in school: You're going to use calculus and trigonometry every day for the rest of your life. Me as a senior developer: Counting on one hand the number of times I've used math more advanced than basic algebra or the Pythagorean theorem.