First off, I have no interest in being a mathematician. Math was always and continues to be quite difficult for me.
So, as an outsider to advanced math, it blows my mind that there are people who’s entire job title is mathematician. How does that work? What does a mathematician do?
Maths is the cornerstone of engineering and science. It’s probably one of the most versatile skills. Add physics and you have a control/electrical engineer. Add computer science and you have a programmer. Add economics and you have an equity trader. Maths alone has huge scope in research.
Earning my ways with programming almost anything on anything for 40 years, let me tell you that a) I’ve never needed anything I learned in my universities math courses, and b) mathematicians make horrible programmers because they might know the theory, but often lack on the real programming side.
I call bullshit.
If you were coding in the 80’s i have hard time beliving you did not use math in Pascal or COBOL. And i remember needing lots of math with anything 3d in 2000
Also you cant state all mathematicians make horrible programmers because they often lack the “real programming side”. Its not a boolean. They might be bad coders because they are bad at coding, not because they are mathematics. Its like saying all painters are bad writers. Both coding and math have a lot of overlapping qualitities and people who understand other have easier time learning other, but it does not mean they are inherently good or bad in the other one.
You’ve been inverting matrices left and right. You just didn’t realise.
I mean, while this definitely does happen in reality, in particular if you count data scientists towards programmers, I feel like I need to point out that neither knowing computer science, nor maths, makes you a good programmer.
In fact, if you tell me someone is a computer science professor, I will assume that they are a bad programmer, because programming takes practice, which is not something they’ll have time for.