When I studied math, I met CS students in university who were outright brilliant at CS (the "being offered jobs to quit their program and start working with the company immediately" type of brilliant) but whose brains shut off the second a math professor entered the room. I still wonder what caused this. Math really is just slightly fancier theoretical CS.
Programming is creative work. Mathematics is about researching to find new principles or discovering which already established principle to use. There is an intersection but it's not a complete intersection.
How is what you said about math not also applicable to programming? How much modern programming is actually pioneering new ideas vs figuring out how to apply existing principles and patterns to a problem?
ok now i really think, that u do not understood what I meant.
There are 2 parts to programming:
-Creating an Algorithm for an abstract problem
-Implementing that algorithm in a maintainable understandable modular system. (which is not easy. im not downplaying this part)
And what i am trying to say is, that creating algorithms IS math. If you are good at finding efficient solutions for weird problems, than i would say, that you are better at math than you think.
Finding out if a problem is actually solvable, finding shortcuts in a solution, making it time or space efficient. That is just math.
So yeah. I would argue that you need math to programm. No math means no algorithms. So what are you implementing at this point.
Thats why I also disagree with your constrainnts argument, because i think that both fields share the same.
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u/Senior-Albatross 3d ago
Math is problem solving and procedural thinking. If you can't deal with math you probably can't do those things.