this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
267 points (91.8% liked)
math
829 readers
7 users here now
General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world
Submit link and text posts about anything at all related to mathematics.
Questions about mathematical topics are allowed, but NO HOMEWORK HELP. Communities for general math and homework help should be firmly delineated just as they were on reddit.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I don't know about that, I know a lot of successful programmers who never took calculus.
The barrier to entry for programming is considerably lower today than it was even 15 years ago. Lots of kids, myself included back in the day, were learning basic control flow in languages like C, Python, or JavaScript long before taking advanced math courses in high school.
Where I grow up sum at least is thought in all high school. Final exam in many high school (mine included) must have at least exercises on integrals, that are just infinitesimal sums.
If one went to high schools, 90% they know these symbols. Very few of them can program.
Programming doesn't require math, but scientific computing, algorithms and hpc do require understanding of linear algebra, as computers "think" in linear algebra
It was never required in my school district, where the minimum requirement was Algebra 2.
But the popularity of this post kind of proves my point. There are a lot of programmers out there who readily understood the for loops on the right, but not the sigma notation on the left. Pretending their experience is invalid cuts us off from a potential avenue to help more people understand these concepts.