
Ask HN: Programming to learn math? - HiroshiSan
Hey Guys,<p>I&#x27;m doing an undergrad in math and would like to learn programming to help me better learn math, are there any intro programming books with a large emphasis on math?
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tkosan
I am the main developer of the MathPiper open source computer algebra system
([http://mathpiper.org](http://mathpiper.org)). An effective kind of
programming language to learn that will help you learn math is a programming
language that is part of a computer algebra system. The following video shows
MathPiper solving an equation step-by-step:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6bwNBkAK0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6bwNBkAK0)

If you are interested in learning the MathPiper programming language and how
this solver works, feel free to contact me using the email address that is in
my profile.

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HiroshiSan
Cool! I'll check out the documentation and definitely shoot you an email if I
have any questions.

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oveddan
Try learning shader programming. It's math based and you draw beautiful
visualizations that represent math equations. An excellent tutorial is at
[http://thebookofshaders.com/](http://thebookofshaders.com/)

~~~
HiroshiSan
This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for thank you.

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a-saleh
What math would you mean?

Calculus? More on the "building the theory" or "being able to do differential
equations"

Algebra? Linear? Group-theory?

Discrete math? Logic? Proofs within logic systems? Completness theorem?

Graph Theory?

There is lots of different parts of math that would be suited to different
kinds of projects :-)

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tom5
You asked a good question and I do think programming is a good way to help
lean math. This is a good book:

Numerical Recipes [http://nrbook.com](http://nrbook.com)

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temp246810
One thing you may be interested is numerical analysis.

You can take this course as part of your major (it's usually required, but
sometimes it's an elective).

This will guide you through some basic programming and teach you big O
notation to boot.

You'll also do analysis on same basic algorithms.

The only drawback in my opinion is that the course is usually taught in MatLab
which you won't be able easily translate into building a small web app or
something if you wanted to.

Overall, was very happy with the course - served as an intro to programming of
sorts.

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Koshkin
You can try _Functional Differential Geometry_ by Sussman and Wisdom (which
exists both as a printed book and as a freely downloadable PDF file). It is an
interesting experiment in teaching mathematics by heavily relying on the
computer for doing symbolic transformations, which requires the complete
clarity in the notation and the understanding of the material.

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ranc1d
Alan Downey's books makes use of programming to get across ideas in
statistics, probability and complexity if those areas are of interest.

See here books are free to read online.

[http://greenteapress.com/wp/](http://greenteapress.com/wp/)

~~~
HiroshiSan
Wow! What a wonderful resource thanks so much.

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rajacombinator
I think the other way around makes much more sense ...

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trelliscoded
The Mathematica book might be what you're looking for.

