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sorry, but i can't help myself here
On Tue, 2004-01-06 at 05:23, Bob Wyman wrote:
> Michael Kay wrote:
> > Actually, the hard part of programming is the logic,
> Precisely! I get real tired of people assuming that
> programmers have to be mathematicians... It just isn't true.
programmers don't have to be mathematicians, and in fact many areas of
programming don't need mathematics.
but most programmers need more a passing knowledge of maths. anyone
working in modeling - which includes most programmers these days, must
understand more than high school maths.
anyone analysing financial results must know more than high school
maths.
most of the papers referred to on this list use and require more than
high school maths to understand.
what i might ask is the point of arguing about the significance of
complexity if we don't have clear definitions of these things - and
that's what mathematics gives us.
but it's also true that most people's idea of mathematics is not what a
mathematician today would recognise (and i'm probably out of date as
well).
>
> > although mathematicians tend to regard themselves as
> > the only people who understand logic, I have come across
> > linguists and lawyers who understand it just as well or better.
> Actually, until recently logic was almost exclusively taught
> and studied in philosophy departments and sometimes in law schools.
> (although when I took "Legal Reasoning"
that would be an oxymoron ;)
> back in the early 70's it was
> taught by the Philosophy Department.) It has only been in the last few
> decades (since the introduction of computers) that logic has entered
> into the curriculum of engineering schools and, I think, only since
> the mid-1800's that it has been studied heavily by mathematicians.
that's not strictly true - the distinction between logic and mathematics
has only been recognised - and then logic as one aspect of mathematics -
since the 19th century - and that probably only applies to western
cultures.
>
> bob wyman
>
and could we really develop and use asn.1 without mathematics?
>
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