Ask HN: Best mathematics courses for programming and intrigue?
What college courses did you take that you found to apply to programming (e.g. algorithms, logic) or found to be genuinely interesting?
FWIW: I'm a philosophy major with many courses in medicine, but it turns out RIT doesn't have a medically-related minor. So I'm turning to math. I start my math minor in a month. I've taken calculus and biostats previously. I know Perl, PHP, JavaScript, R, SQL, shell scripting and CSS/HTML. I do computational biology research with a professor and I hope to translate coding skills into an intro level job at a startup like Comprehend.com or Automattic.com.
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Probability and Statistics. A MUST if you want to look into AI or machine learning.
Discrete math was cool, but I have found it largely not useful in my career thus far. But I think a large part of that is me being a programmer as opposed to a computer scientist, and also not someone who works with circuits. Neat class though.
That's all I can personally speak to.
Combinatorics [1]. I took it in college and was really interested and the professor made us program in Mathematica as well.
Probability and Statistics
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics
Boolean Logic
Automata + Computability
Statistics
Relational Algebra
Logic, Set Theory, & Proofs
Linear Algebra I/II