It is often echoed that mathematicians make excellent software engineers, and that their logic-adjacent work will translate efficiently into coding and designing.
I have found this to be almost universally untrue. I might even say the inverse is true.
While I and many of my peers have capacity to navigate the mathematical world, it certainly is not what sets us (at least me) apart when designing clever algorithms and software tricks.
Point being: I dont think the property/trait that makes good programmers is mathematical literacy.
I would love to hear what others experience is regarding this.
For real, though, I wish maths in general, in all fields, adopted the way things are written in programming.
So, instead of something like:
e = mc²Just write it out:
energy = mass * speed_causality²And I mean, that’s still a harmless formula. I’ve had to learn so many formulas, where not the formulas were the problem, rather it was knowing what φ means in this field/context. So many scientific papers are just extremely hard to read for anyone from a different field, because the formulas are obfuscated like that.
And the thing is, I get that pure mathematicians don’t care. Their formula inputs usually truly don’t have much of a meaning beyond
aandb.But their conventions, in particular multiplication being implied when two random letters are written next to each other, that just fucks up the option for anyone in any other field to use legible variable names.
“So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that”
This isn’t really an issue though, of you don’t have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it’s calculated matter?