crphang

In professional programming, most of the time, system design is most crucial and would use less of these mathematics. These 900 pages is not insurmountable. A discrete mathematics course for year 1 computer science students would have covered a good 70% of it. Such a course takes only 3 months and is 1/5 of a student's workload.

The benefits of these is hardly questionable. Its use is apparent when you take a Design and Analysis of algorithms course like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPyuH4qXLZ0. A good example of using knowledge of the pdf is analysing expected runtime of a hashtable. Which turns out to be theta(1) average case. Good analysis of algorithms inspire better design of it in general.

Data structure and software engineering courses would probably be sufficient for many software engineering jobs out there. Databases, networks, OS and security are good to have knowledge. However, if an engineer is building cutting edge stuff, Mathematics will be his/her best friend.

One good property of Mathematics is that it provide guarantees in the form of equality, inequalities or equivalences. Such guarantees can help you ensure that your system holds quantitatively. It is thus your job to reduce your computer science/engineering problem to a mathematics problem.

I find this remark by Terence Tao particularly good: "If you don’t have mathematical background, the classes you take will help you train to analyze existing systems and build things that haven’t been built before. If you want to design something really new, at some point you’ll have to model what you’re doing, which might be different from previous models, and you have to do some mathematics somewhere." This remark is made in this interview: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rinL25rC8LnMTzZcGjg1axT-...

Really fun. The algorithm generates new nouns based on my drawing on the fly and add to the original pool. It stops and say 'Oh I know, it is ___', when there exist a guess that is the same as the answer. Might seem like it is really clever, or, it could have like 1000 guesses for every stroke and one of it is the correct answer.

My bathtub looks too ridiculous for it to be able to guess it with confidence.