
Ask HN: Can you do graphics programming professionally if you don't like math? - _bxg1
Currently I work in web, but for side projects the last year or two I&#x27;ve worked on things like noise functions and most recently a raytracer. And I&#x27;m finding that I like it, a <i>lot</i>.<p>What I don&#x27;t like is pure-math. Programming is intuitive to me, even geometry is intuitive to me, but when you give me a blob of symbols my eyes glaze over. I know how to parse it but it doesn&#x27;t <i>mean</i> anything to me. Mostly in my graphics projects, whenever I&#x27;ve come across a formula, I just paste it into my code from the internet and call it good. Fully grasping how the math works requires translating it to something spatial&#x2F;geometric, which isn&#x27;t always possible (this is how I got through my linear algebra class in college). When it gets into calculus transformations, I experience active revulsion.<p>Does working in this field professionally require an appetite for such things? Or is it one of those cases where only the researchers really have to deal with the math and everyone else just uses it?
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ktpsns
I think you are absolutely fine. Your field won't require fancy bleeding edge
math research so you go well with equations developed hundreds of years ago,
which can be found in many many textbooks. There are also gazzilions of
tutorials etc which try to instruct coders with math.

From my experience, it is absolutely possible to do advanced 3D programming
stuff without any idea of rotation matrices or quaternions, despite they might
be used internally. Hell, I even used sin() and cos() on computers when I did
not yet know their meaning because we did not cover it yet in school. I just
copied code from somewhere and it magically worked.

(Disclaimer: In the meantime, I did a PhD in theoretical physics, which is
very close to mathematics)

