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by closeparen 2822 days ago
No, it’s not. Software engineering is about creating and communicating logical structures, which is closer to writing philosophy papers than to cranking quadratic equations or knowing the integrals of trigonometric functions. Some high school math may be incidentally useful in the analysis of algorithmic complexity, but the structural correspondence between math and programming doesn’t show up until math transitions from quantitative (numeric and symbolic computation) to qualitative (proofs) well after the end of the high school curriculum.
1 comments

Good proof methods are symbolic computations. Hoare logic and the predicate calculus are the two major examples I know of. In fact in my personal favorite formalism, a proof is actually rather a lot like an equation[1].

It's an observable reality that most "pure" mathematical proofs are rather less rigorous than the best CS work, simply because peer reviewers are rather more lenient than computing machines.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD13xx/E...