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by aphextron 2756 days ago
Seconded for this. Going back and taking an actual structured math course at community college after working professionally as a programmer for years was a real eye opening experience for me. So many things that seemed so abstract and meaningless as a 12 year old were instantly apparently useful in an unimaginable number of ways.
1 comments
teej 2755 days ago
What courses did you take?
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aphextron 2755 days ago
>What courses did you take?

Nothing advanced, just Trig, Geometry (proofs based), Algebra and Precalculus. Basically what a sharp high school senior in college prep classes would be familiar with. Geometry was probably the best. If you've never encountered formal proofs before, it's probably the best training for pure logic I can imagine. They start out incredibly frustrating but become addictive once you figure out how to crack them. Precalc was insanely useful too. Learning how to build up a function and shape it with various operators, and work with polynomials is absolutely essential for things like graphics shaders and timing functions and all kinds of other stuff that comes up in UI development (my work). All I can say is that it will give you a much greater appreciation for studying the purely abstract rather than always focusing on practical matters that come up in engineering, as well as making apparent more elegant solutions you may have brute forced in the past.

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DevoidSimo 2754 days ago
Where are you that high school only covers up to precalculus? In Australia (depending on the level) you do multivariate calculus among other things. Perhaps other subjects aren't covered as deeply.
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aphextron 2753 days ago
>Where are you that high school only covers up to precalculus? In Australia (depending on the level) you do multivariate calculus among other things. Perhaps other subjects aren't covered as deeply.

I'm from the US. The state of mathematics education here is absolutely embarrassing to pretty much any other developed country. Taking precalculus is actually considered advanced, most students graduate with nothing more than an "Algebra" class that covers basic algebraic notation, quadratic equations, linear equations, and not much beyond that. Calculus 1 (single variable) is considered an advanced math class that is only taken by STEM majors for freshman university students here.

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