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Funny how people perceive programming as way more advanced than multiplication, but you could write this program before you memorized the multiplication tables.
by blt 13y ago
Funny how people perceive programming as way more advanced than multiplication, but you could write this program before you memorized the multiplication tables.
I think the sequence of topics in math education is really wrong. Another example: in the USA, "discrete math" is a college class at the same level as calculus (or higher!), even though it mostly builds off elementary algebra.
- vidarh 13y agoI learned symbolic differentiation by reading a book about Prolog that used some of the rules as an example and translating it into Pascal (I didn't have a Prolog interpreter) and then adding additional rules from my maths textbook. I then figured out operator precedence parsing because I got annoyed at having to manually translate the math to something the rules engine could handle. To this day, my preferred way of understanding maths is by looking at implementations of the algorithms - I find mathematical notation and every maths textbook I've seen to be extremely tedious and overcomplicated compared to code (of course with the caveat that at least some of this is because I've spent far more time learning to understand programming, though I still found that route easier when I was in school)