I've been making progress on a Computer Science degree for a while now, and have been working as an intern-level programmer for the last couple years. I'll be graduating in May and going to work for Cisco. Background over, I can tell you that, in my (albeit limited) experience, you don't need virtually ANY math to work in software. If that's what you're into, you can forget differential equations. Equations in general, for that matter. 
If your goal is to get a job and work as a programmer / sysadmin / IT guy, leave the math behind.
If you want to be an actual computer *scientist*, though, things might be different. There's a lot of math in the theory of computers, and that's something I can't speak to very well. If you're looking to stay in academia, or make a career out of research, you'll need your math. I'm not sure if you need a lot of differential equations in general, but theory is very math heavy. Industry == know about computers, and a tiny bit about math. Theory == know about math, and maybe a tiny bit about computers.
If your goal is to get a job and work as a programmer / sysadmin / IT guy, leave the math behind.If you want to be an actual computer *scientist*, though, things might be different. There's a lot of math in the theory of computers, and that's something I can't speak to very well. If you're looking to stay in academia, or make a career out of research, you'll need your math. I'm not sure if you need a lot of differential equations in general, but theory is very math heavy. Industry == know about computers, and a tiny bit about math. Theory == know about math, and maybe a tiny bit about computers.
Both of them are linked together, though. Yes, you can be a code monkey and just write what you know and never actually utilize the math, but actual good programmers actually do very little code writing and do far more analysis of how the different segments of code will interact, and how to optimize them, before even touching the code in the first place.
Basically, it's a matter of how up the pipeline you want to eventually rise. It'll be necessary to keep your math skills to progress in your profession.
And if we're getting into electrical engineering stuff and dealing with the actual electricity on the circuitry and what have you? Yeah, you better believe you're going to need to know your math.
So this isn't really games-based...
- 14/12/2010 04:10:35 AM
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Re: So this isn't really games-based...
- 14/12/2010 02:08:07 PM
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Don't listen to this guy 
- 14/12/2010 05:39:05 PM
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- 14/12/2010 05:39:05 PM
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The answer is actually fairly simple.
- 14/12/2010 07:39:20 PM
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