Recently, a student, “James”, asked if it was possible for him to work in the computer field, even if he doesn’t like math and says he’s not good at it.
The short answer: yes. The longest answer? Yes and no.
There is a great opportunity for the development of all kinds of software and hardware that do not require mathematics per se. Fields like software/application design and UX (user experience) quality assurance require an understanding of the language involved and how software interacts with hardware in general, but not deep math.
So James can certainly make a good career of working with computers without knowing their epsilons and deltas.
But will mathematics be useful?
Some areas, like some of the formulas we memorized in calculus class, won’t be helpful. But others, like discrete mathematics, will be very useful to James: they will teach him concrete concepts that he can use in his work, and they will also help him develop an analytical mind that will be useful to him.
Consider this: if James wants to analyze a program that he or his team writes and see if he can improve it in some way, that is, change the structure of the program so that it runs more efficiently, that is essentially a mathematical question, what is? called “algorithms”: James can examine the program and find parts that are redundant or can be done in a better way, then revise the program.
However, you don’t have to be thinking strictly in mathematical terms to do this: the kind of thinking you’re doing, about the structures within the program and how they relate to each other, is very much like what some mathematicians do. . So good programming, at least in many kinds of programming, is very similar to mathematical thinking and the kind of thinking used in problems in discrete math classes.
The only area you could go into with computers that really requires a deep understanding of a wide variety of mathematics would be theoretical computer science, like what college computer scientists work on. The work they do is math intensive and requires an understanding of calculus, analysis, which is like a more formalized version of calculus, logic, statistics, and linear algebra.
On the other hand, theoretical computing is probably not what James is interested in to begin with. If he wants to work with computers and use them to solve cool real-world problems, he’ll probably do fine even if he gets a C in calculus.