

Ask HN: Best mathematics courses for programming and intrigue? - bsima

What college courses did you take that you found to apply to programming (e.g. algorithms, logic) or found to be genuinely interesting?<p>FWIW: I&#x27;m a philosophy major with many courses in medicine, but it turns out RIT doesn&#x27;t have a medically-related minor. So I&#x27;m turning to math. I start my math minor in a month. I&#x27;ve taken calculus and biostats previously. I know Perl, PHP, JavaScript, R, SQL, shell scripting and CSS&#x2F;HTML. I do computational biology research with a professor and I hope to translate coding skills into an intro level job at a startup like Comprehend.com or Automattic.com.
======
solidparallel
Linear algebra can be useful depending on what you plan to work with (SUPER
useful for graphics, not so useful for building a simple online game)

Probability and Statistics. A MUST if you want to look into AI or machine
learning.

Discrete math was cool, but I have found it largely not useful in my career
thus far. But I think a large part of that is me being a programmer as opposed
to a computer scientist, and also not someone who works with circuits. Neat
class though.

That's all I can personally speak to.

------
codegeek
I suggest the following:

Combinatorics [1]. I took it in college and was really interested and the
professor made us program in Mathematica as well.

Probability and Statistics

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorics)

------
gabeguz
Just off the top of my head:

Boolean Logic

Automata + Computability

Statistics

Relational Algebra

------
dscb
Discrete Mathematics

Logic, Set Theory, & Proofs

Linear Algebra I/II

------
tjr
You might consider taking linear algebra.

