What would a programmer want to learn mathematics for?
Steve Yegge from before Google decided to hogtie him and put him in a gimp suit. He’s recently resurfaced and is blogging again but here’s one from the olden days.
What would a programmer want to learn mathematics for?
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John Hardy Developer 
Discrete math continues to be one of the best courses I ever took in college.
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Math [& Physics] was where I learn’t most of my programming. Mind you that is now decades ago.
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I still remember that Honours Computing exam where one question was a three line proof by contradiction. Assuming you’d actually studied Set Theory in Pure Mathematics III of course. Which very few computer scientists actually do.
Seven hours later (when they finally cancelled the exam) some of the students were still trying to recreate an entire discipline of mathematics from first principles…
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Ian Borchardt thinking from first principles is good and software engineers love to reinvent the wheel. It goes with imagining that they’re the first person to have ever encountered any particular problem.
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Oh, and the lecturer’s answer to the exam question was later deemed to be in error.
Setting questions outside the scope of the actual course material is always somewhat problematic.
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