Math for Programmers

Steve Yegge is back with another gem of an article. This time on mathematics. Math is one of those subjects with which I have bitter-sweet association. Bitter because I suffered through all my engineering math classes and that showed up in my marks sheet ;). Even that hasn't managed to ween me off mathematics.

I buy mathematics books occasionally, from history of mathematics to college level mathematics related to computing. I dip into these books when I run out of other books to read, or during a power-cut :)

The right way to learn math is breadth-first, not depth-first. You need to survey the space, learn the names of things, figure out what's what.

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This is the exact way I learnt programming and computers. I used to run though every book I laid my hands on in the PESIT library. From assembly language programming books to XENIX user manual(!). I did not know then what I was looking for. It was all just fun. The patterns and "intuition" came later.

I think the best way to start learning math is to spend 15 to 30 minutes a day surfing in Wikipedia. It's filled with articles about thousands of little branches of mathematics. You start with pretty much any article that seems interesting (e.g. String theory, say, or the Fourier transform, or Tensors, anything that strikes your fancy.) Start reading. If there's something you don't understand, click the link and read about it. Do this recursively until you get bored or tired.

That is a nice piece of advice! Perhaps what kept me from pursuing math further is the mental model which forces me to "learn" mathematics by "doing" it with a pencil and paper.

This paragraph struck a chord with me:

For me, I've noticed that a few domains I've always been interested in (including artificial intelligence, machine learning, natural language processing, and pattern recognition) use a lot of math. And as I've dug in more deeply, I've found that the math they use is no more difficult than the sum total of the math I learned in high school; it's just different math, for the most part.

Its a good article to rediscover math. Go ahead, read it.

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