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One of my biggest regrets is not having studied (more) math. But would I regret not studying CS had I studied math? You really can't win :/
by qsort 5y ago
One of my biggest regrets is not having studied (more) math. But would I regret not studying CS had I studied math?
You really can't win :/
- qiskit 5y agoCS is math...
- dumpsterlid 5y agoIn a practical sense, not really.
- l33t2328 5y agoI’d argue math is actually (a proper subset of) CS.
- Koshkin 5y agoBut the real numbers cannot be faithfully represented in a computer!
- l33t2328 5y agoSo? Neither can the list of possible computer programs, yet CS studies them
- ravi-delia 5y agoMath is at it's broadest the study of formal systems. Computer science is the study of a particular formal system. While it is a powerful enough system to contain all of math within it, there are many such systems nested within each other. Is the Turing machine formalism more powerful? No. Is it more efficient or intuitive? Also no. It requires axiomatic reasoning to construct, and then reproduces it internally. Math and CS are set equal, but one predefines an entry point and the other does not. From the human perspective math gives rise to CS, which is just one of math's many children.
- l33t2328 5y agoI’d argue that logic is a subfield of computability theory, and so by extension we (in CS) absorb math.
- ravi-delia 5y agoLike I said, you can indeed construct logic through CS! But you can also obviously construct CS from logic. You can also construct logic through the natural numbers, so number theory absorbs math and by extension CS? Fact is anything reasonably complex can replicate everything else. Exactly one of these fields, however, is specifically carved out as the study of any formal system, and it isn't CS.
- l33t2328 5y agoI’m arguing that logic is a subfield of CS, so “constructing” CS “from” logic isn’t a contradiction.
- qiskit 5y agoCS only involves computable numbers ( Turing ) which are a subset of real numbers. By definition CS is a subset of math, not vice versa.
- turtleyacht 5y agoSame. But we can keep looking for opportunities to learn math in our spare time. For me though, old CS books have a lure all their own :) Maybe an algorithms book (plus MathOverflow) or TLA+ as a gateway.