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Mathematicians and software (lemmy.world)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming

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It is often echoed that mathematicians make excellent software engineers, and that their logic-adjacent work will translate efficiently into coding and designing.

I have found this to be almost universally untrue. I might even say the inverse is true.

While I and many of my peers have capacity to navigate the mathematical world, it certainly is not what sets us (at least me) apart when designing clever algorithms and software tricks.

Point being: I dont think the property/trait that makes good programmers is mathematical literacy.

I would love to hear what others experience is regarding this.

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[–] jasory 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

"So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that"

This isn't really an issue though, of you don't have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it's calculated matter?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I do think so, yes.

For one, not everyone needs to be an absolute expert. You do want some person with expert knowledge to sanity check what you're doing, but ultimately you'll have engineers, programmers etc. that are tasked with putting a formula into reality. If they can intuitively read formulas and more easily read up on the surrounding context, that helps a lot.

In that sense, I may also be very programmer-biased in how I read papers, but generally I prefer to look at a given formula and then read up on why it is formulated like that. Maybe I also have some form of ADS, but for the life of me, I cannot linearly read a paper front to back. And I'm not alone in that.

From computer science papers / academic texts, I know that this method of reading works perfectly fine. But if I try to delve into any other fields, it's always a matter of first decoding the formula before I can try to figure out what it means.

Ultimately, it just feels like unnecessary hindrance of understanding, even if theoretically you're just hindering those who supposedly wouldn't understand anyways.

[–] jasory 2 points 11 months ago

"From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly"

This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.

I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.