Subj : Re: Good math skills a requirement?
To   : comp.programming
From : Joe Butler
Date : Thu Aug 04 2005 08:48 pm

I think it's just as important for a programmer to know their own
limitations.

I've seen plenty of instances where a programmer thought they were the tops,
"Hmm, standard mathematics.", "Hmm, standard numeric limits float", "Hmm,
Newton Rapheson", "Hmm, technical maths".  But they totally failed to
understand the problem domain and would apply the wrong maths to it, or
perhaps applying the right maths to it but with an errornous implementation
(and results) and just assuming they were right - "Hmm, the maths is not
able to cope with that scenario"

It's been my experience that a good few programmers won't admit to mistakes
or lack of knowledge in certain areas.  Maths is one of them.

"James C." <jcon778@pemail.net> wrote in message
news:Xns96A79191867DAjcon778pemailnet@68.6.19.6...
> This question is probably asked often, but can someone be a decent
> programmer without any advanced math skills? To be more specific, can
> someone get by in programming with simple arithmetic (i.e. addition,
> substraction, multiplication, and division)?
>
> I don't see how a programmer would need anything beyond simple arithmetic
> to write an email client in a programming langauage such as Delphi. How in
> the heck is geometry, trig, calculus, etc. going to aid in this type of
> project?

.