How important is Maths for Programming

It really depends on what you're doing. On the whole, it's very useful though.

For example, I write mobile apps for a living and I spend a lot of time writing UI code. For basic UI code, you don't need to know much about maths. If you want to do custom drawing and custom animation then stuff like trigonometry comes in very handy.

Different branches of programming use different branches of maths. I've yet to meet someone who's good at programming and isn't good at maths too.
 
Even when you think math isn't required it tend to pop up

E.g. The other month I was making a website using google maps. I needed some arrows and ended up having to program some 2D transforms and rotations, then I needed a little other linear algebra and then some line interaction tests, and then a function to auto scale, and algorithm to find the best place to put a label without overlapping, and then understand google's poly line encoding.

Another project required displaying some data on a website. Since the data had awkward ranges I first had to make a log transform, then we realized the amounts of data were quit large but Run length encoding could be used effectively. Once we were displaying the data we thought it would be great if we could automatically analyze the data for anomalies and due to the noisy nature of the data I had to develop a multi-modal non-parametric statistic test.

The data was some thing quite benign like the number of users connected to our server over time so displaying this in a web page and alerting when there are spikes or dips shouldn't be hard but it still required a bit of maths.
 
I'm a programmer with only GCSE maths... but... I've need graph theory quite a bit, and algorithms... maths is pretty well understood and often has optimal solutions to problems so you don't need to re-invent the wheel.
 
Being adept at maths is probably a good indicator - just the ability to think in that way should help with algorithms etc... Also functional programming languages, array programming languages etc.. are geared towards mathematical thinking.

Obviously a lot of programming problems involve trying to solve maths problems too.

Generally its a good idea though there are no doubt plenty of GUI developers, web developers and people doing grunt work - writing code to shift data about, or getting some application to talk to another etc... who perhaps might not see a great need for it day to day.
 
Very important I'm afraid :(
if your working with business applications its vitally important you can use maths although I'm guessing this is different for animations/graphical side of things?
 
billysielu said:
I'm a programmer with only GCSE maths... but... I've need graph theory quite a bit, and algorithms... maths is pretty well understood and often has optimal solutions to problems so you don't need to re-invent the wheel.
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To an extent I've got a certain amount of enjoyment out of re-inventing the wheel - not being that strong at maths (GCSE C) but having a lot of interest in programming I've done a fair amount of it as I've learned along the way and it gives you an understanding sometimes that being taught about the already established way of doing it doesn't always impart.
 
Rroff said:
To an extent I've got a certain amount of enjoyment out of re-inventing the wheel - not being that strong at maths (GCSE C) but having a lot of interest in programming I've done a fair amount of it as I've learned along the way and it gives you an understanding sometimes that being taught about the already established way of doing it doesn't always impart.
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That's completely backwards to my experience. Having an education in mathematics doesn't teach you the "established way of doing things" in programming, an education in programming does that. Learning maths is what gives you the insight into better ways of approaching a problem, be it a programming problem or otherwise.
 
swillsy said:
Very important I'm afraid :(
if your working with business applications its vitally important you can use maths although I'm guessing this is different for animations/graphical side of things?
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rather more important as far as graphics are concerned
 
Algorithm, fractals, programming, 3d designing ...i srsly cant think of anything where math isnt involved in. U are basically engineering something in "space/air".
 
Depends on what you are programming imo. I mostly develop web applications(MS based) alongside iOS and Android apps and maths is not THAT important to it. A basic grasp of things will suffice for most tasks and anything further can be Googled. :D
 
TomWilko said:
I teach Computing at a large secondary school/sixth form. Having a strong grasp of Mathematics is essential in doing well at the subject of Computing. This is nearly entirely down to the link with programming.

I would never say you can't learn programming if your Maths is weak, however I would say the strongest young programmers I have met are superb budding Mathematicians as well.
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Can you expand on that? What are are you requiring of the students that requires the maths?
 
Not important unless what you are programming is mathematical (at a guess simulation of crazy real lift stuff??). I work as an embedded c/c++ programmer and have awful maths.
 
arknor said:
you only need to learn 0 and 1
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Yet so much of other peoples code your end up fixing is off by 1.

Yep math's is needed, I'm sure a D at GCSE now is same as F 10 years ago too.....

But excelling at math doesn't make you a good programmer.
 
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Chris1712 said:
Not important unless what you are programming is mathematical (at a guess simulation of crazy real lift stuff??). I work as an embedded c/c++ programmer and have awful maths.
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Sensible response

Squid said:
Yet so much of other peoples code your end up fixing is off by 1.

Yep math's is needed.
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Not so sensible response - but recovered slightly with the ninja edit :P
 
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dowie said:
rather more important as far as graphics are concerned
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Most games programmers have an extremely limited grasp of maths. Mostly people implement things designed by other people who understand the maths, poke things until they work or learn a narrow subset that helps with the work they actually do.

The maths you need to do computer graphics isn't taught at GCSE anyway.
 
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