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Ask HN: What type of math should the next gen of coders be learning in school?
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?
- trinovantes 4y agoYou're going to need calculus if you want to work with PID control systems or audio/signal processing
- inphovore 4y agoStatistics. 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 4y ago> 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 4y agoBut 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
- SamReidHughes 4y agoTaking 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.