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A comment on A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics. Parent comment

Re:A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics by angry_octet on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @06:43AM (#8996325)
This could not be further from the truth. I doubt my CS professors would be able to solve a PDE (or algebraic geometry etc etc). Likewise, few math professors would be able to write a parser generator (or code worth a damn).

In contrast, I know engineers who live and breathe PDEs and tweak compilers to solve them faster.

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Re:A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics by Energy1 on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @07:03AM (#8996397)
PDE's are not discrete math. CompSci majors are more interested in topics like Combinatorics, Graph Theory etc. PDE's are more interesting to applied mathematicians and physicists.

I doubt my CS professors would be able to solve a PDE..

Beyond the basics, not even many math professors can do that. Math is too vast and people specialize. Strong algebraic geometers are not necessarily strong analysts or algebraists or logicians.

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Re:A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics by Pyret on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @08:23AM (#8996627)
Two things.

1) No such thing as universal mathematician in this day and age.

2) Engineer's PDEs(algorithms) are not the same as mathematician's PDEs(theory). Same as comparing a student in China who learned English to communicate with English speakers to English majors from English speaking countries.

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Re:A Software Engineer’s Adventures in Learning Mathematics by jghn on Wednesday February 04, 2015 @09:44AM (#8997019)
It wasn't that long ago that most schools did not have a separate CS degree, but rather it was a math degree w/ a concentration in computer science (or some other verbiage to describe the same thing)
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