Today we will consider quite popular question from people who think of being a programmer " does a programmer need to know mathematics?" Recently, this question is often in my email box and among private messages in social networks, so it's time to expand to answer.If you try tofind in Google whether the programmer needs mathematics, you will get both positive and negative answers. My younger brother is a programmer. When he was a student and began to work, he pay for statistics homework and get his marks. He sisn't have enouht time for it and did not consider it necessary to pay much attention to this subject. And for all his practical work as a web programmer, since the middle of 2012, he used the knowledge of higher mathematics 3-4 times. Without the regular use of knowledge of probability theory, which was necessary in these cases, had to raise the book and remember the forgotten theory.
The rest of his time he was programming and school mathematics was mostly enough. I will tell more, not all school mathematics was necessary to it. There were no projects where it was necessary to apply knowledge, for example, school geometry.
The main task of a programmer is to explain to a computer what to do in one of the programming languages. And for this higher mathematics is not necessary. The only obligatory subject of higher mathematics is mathematical logic. Without it it is impossible to build conditional expressions. And even it is necessary to know no more than 20%.
Elementary mathematics is necessary for all technical specialists. Even web designers to count and translate units, calculate percentages, etc.
What do you think about it?
