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Comment Some suggestions based on personal experience (Score 1) 466

I will try to address your question with three personal views - one of an IT professional, one of a PhD CS student and one of an admirer of Math:

As an IT professional with 15 years of IT experience I say that you do not need any Math beyond most rudimentary arithmetic and some statistics used in spreadsheets and reports. If you need to calculate something and to figure out formulas you will likely use Google or a mailing list. Even logic as programming logic is pretty basic and far away from predicate calculus that one studies in school. One may say that this may change but for millions of COBOL, VB and Java programmers nothing has changed about this in the past thirty years, except that you may only need less math now.

As a PhD student in CS who *has* to be good at Math both for theoretical work and for the craft, so I have few advices to offer gathered from personal experience, learning and exploration:

Most math ever required to be decent at Computer Science is concentrated in the (hybrid) field of mathematics called Discrete Mathematics. If your skills are strong enough to know this field well then you are set. In addition, you should probably be good at series and limits as they are fundamental to asymptotic analysis and at linear algebra.

As an admirer of Math I can tell you that the most fundamental skill for Computer Science is Mathematics. True, fundamental Computer and Computational Science is Mathematics. To be really good at CS you need to be strong at Set and Number Theory, Probability and Statistics, Calculus through Differential Equations, Graph Theory and Linear Algebra.

Regards,
Edmon
My blog entries on math and science are here.

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