| Hi everybody Do you need maths ... well, I always had this strange relationship to maths -- I was pretty good at it, and pretty unconventional. I never was interested in replicating the proofs my profs were so keen on ... or when solving integrals everything ended up into negative values (which obviously sometimes it shouldn't) I was pretty easy about just "abolishing" the minus sign since we knew that it had to end up with a plus (and sure the calculation was correct, apart from that minus sign). Later, when I trained for electrical engineering (which I abolished later on for more adventurous stuff than high voltage switching -- which was talking to Good, according to one of the professors), I remember myself relaxedly listening to what the prof told us about multi-dimensional spaces and numerical analysis -- taking notes every so often, but hardly copying his entire script. Again a few years later I shocked psychologists trying to explain factor analysis to me by nodding briefly and muttering "ah, so this is just a coordinate transformation of some sorts ... (and I was crap at *doing coordinate transformations myself, but I think I've got somehow an idea of what a coordinate transformation does, it's like expressing MPG in litres/100km). So I'd say: no, you don't need maths for CS. It might even hinder your understanding of CS. But an understanding of maths -- or a feeling of what maths is about -- certainly helps ... not only in CS / pt (I know that this comment is probably not really helpful, but I enjoyed writing it) On 4 mei 2007, at 15:27, Carol Webb wrote:
Dr. Peter Troxler [ k n w l d g ] --------------------------------------- the ability to think differently is more important than the knowledge gained. |