Do you need to know math to become a good programmer? Most beginner developers will say “no”. Anyone can become a developer or a programmer, providing he or she has enough time for studying and sufficient information to do it. If today you can pick up a book, read it, and memorize certain points, tomorrow you can write a code to say “Hello World”.
Experienced developers will tell you that math is an integral part of programming. You may not need to know how to solve complex integrals to create programs but knowing how to do it can help you.
How Are Math And Programming Related?
It may not be easy to pinpoint the direct relation between different types of math and programming. But why is it so much easier for a mathematician to become a coder than it would be for, let’s say, a social worker? Mathematicians have something called “mathematical thinking”. In order to solve mathematical tasks, people who deal with math, learn a certain way of thinking. A complicated task, which may take a social worker an hour to solve, gets cracked in a minute by a mathematician.
We are not talking about complex knowledge. It can be a problem anyone with sufficient brainpower can solve. However, if you don’t have mathematical thinking, it will just take you longer.
1. Abstraction
Abstraction is one of the most important skills mathematicians have, which can be used in programming. They can shrug off all the unnecessary information and focus on the important parts of the problem.
2. Perspective
Or maybe it should be called pliability. Learning math helps you change your point of view to suit a particular task. The brain pliability is possible to achieve with some training. People, who know math, usually have an easier time exercising it.
Simply put, if you see something in one fashion, it doesn’t mean you have to use this approach to work with the problem.
3. Theory
The above two things can be achieved by experience, be it in math or programming. This one is more complicated. Once you go deeper into coding, you realize how important the math theory is. It’s hard to turn from an average programmer to an outstanding developer without knowing math theory.
The leading developer from BedRock IT shares his experience: “As I got deeper and deeper into development, I realized how much information I was lacking. You need a good level of math skills to understand 3D graphs, cryptography, obfuscation and deobfuscation, compression, etc. I could be a decent programmer without it. But I wanted to go beyond decent, so I went back to math.”
4. Answers
Knowing mathematics can help you answer a variety of questions that come up during development, such as “Will the program guarantee an answer to the problem?”, “What can I do to make my program faster and less space-consuming”, “Can I improve the efficiency of the program?”
5. Logical Thinking
Logical thinking is vital to both math and programming. If you use math on a regular basis, you know how to apply logical thinking to solve problems. This skill can help you write programs much faster than someone, who is just getting to know logical approaches to problem solving.
Bottom Line
You CAN become a programmer if you don’t know anything but basic high school math. However, you can’t become an excellent coder without it. With time, developers and programmers realize that they are lacking something in the math department and they start taking math courses.
Math skills benefit programmers. They help achieve new heights.