It is valid to criticize how our current society disproportionately economically reward STEM fields while ignoring social sciences, philosophy, anthropology, etc. and thus often creating these math nerd types who are simultaneously racist or reactionary idiots, but (assuming you’re being serious) dismissing math as “fake” only reads as very bitter
Comment on STEM
happybadger@hexbear.net 8 months ago
I’ve taken multiple advanced trigonometry courses and still can’t really say what trigonometry is. Mathematics is just the fake thing that made puzzle kids feel smart before chess was invented. Oh wow you can make little symbols and they’re a special language only you can speak showing how clever you are. Neat they make a circle I thought I could draw one of those but I need a fucking PhD apparently.
spacecadet@hexbear.net 8 months ago
brisk@aussie.zone 8 months ago
I would argue our society disproportionately economically rewards TE fields and S&M (no not like that) get lip service because if they didn’t get a mention it would be far too obvious how disconnected economic value is from societal value
Jordan_U@lemmy.ml 8 months ago
I’ve ended up using calculus and trig for programming multiple times.
You may be able to draw a circle without math, but teaching a computer to draw a circle requires an understanding of math.
All of machine learning is rooted in linear algebra, rust is a very practical programming language that gains most of its power through category theory.
You don’t need to know high level math to be a successful developer, but it can really help in many areas. I can’t really think of how to categorize which areas high level math is more or less likely to show up in, which I guess itself kind of supports my point.
Just understanding what a derivative is and what an integral is can help you determine what problems are solvable and what aren’t, and let you think ahead about what information you might want to hold onto in your data structures. ( Think about what the +C in this integral represents in the real world, and what data you need to pin that down concretely ).
Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
the engineer in me counters that you can trivially teach a computer to draw a circle by giving it an arm that can ONLY draw circles