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by Al-Khwarizmi 3506 days ago
I don't think it was pretentious, and your analogy is quite off. You don't need to understand any of those fields to grok bubblesort (algorithmics is enough). You do need to know some statistics, calculus and algorithmics to understand stochastic gradient descent.
2 comments

you don't need to understand statitstics. calculus (calculus is a high school subject and is hardly deep), and what is "algorithmics"? If you mean the study of any and all algorithms, then sure,
3 fields, but each only at an introductory level.