Ask HN: What type of math should the next gen of coders be learning in school?

[kjellsbells]

In college admissions, I see evidence that AP Calculus is essentially a lazy proxy for "does the kid have some thinking ability" even when the student is applying for a course that uses calculus very lightly, if at all.

Recent grads I know spent their time wrangling matrices, thinking in hex and traversing graphs. Honestly it all looks very much as if the infamous New Math from the 1960s would have been a better grounding than calculus.

Don't get me wrong, calc is awesome. But maybe middle and high schoolers need stronger linear algebra to be better coders. Thoughts?

[SamReidHughes]

Taking linear algebra beyond what is already covered in high school is not as useful or essential as material about logarithms, infinite series, and trigonometry. I think the curriculum is pretty good -- maybe it's a bit too interested in conic sections.

[trinovantes]

You're going to need calculus if you want to work with PID control systems or audio/signal processing

[inphovore]

Statistics.

Modern AI is automated statistics.

A sound understanding of statistics will also help them comprehend economics, finance, political science, and have a better chance of bullshit detection.

[version_five → inphovore]

> Modern AI is automated statistics.

Only in the narrowest possible sense. If we're optimizing for AI (which we shouldn't), linear algebra is what's most important, specifically matrix manipulation

[an1sotropy → version_five]

But also still some (vector) calc, to have an intuition for what a gradient is, and how linear algebra informs computation of each step of optimization