[geebee]

I agree. Even as a math major myself, I have only needed formal math when math was part of the domain knowledge. Math is a great major, but I think you can be an absolutely top programmer with a degree in a different subject or no degree at all.

I mentioned this because if you want to be the kind of programmer with a CS or related degree, you'll need to be very good at math.

[tptacek]

You do not need to be very good at math to get a CS degree. The last role I had was in a company heavily loaded up with UMich CS grad students, none of whom could (for instance) deploy a discrete cosine transform.

There's a level of "street math" that good programmers tend to have (statistics, maybe some trig, maybe basic matrix arithmetic), but you'd be surprised how many excellent programmers don't even use algebra. A friend of mine interviewed at a very famous quant hedge fund (a decade or so ago) and shocked his interviewer by answering one of the questions with a system of equations in two variables.

[geebee]

I'd expect UMich CS to be very strong. I haven't looked at the undergrad curriculum, but I'd be surprised if it doesn't require calculus through differential equations, along with some more advanced electives.

I should have defined "tough math," because a lot of people on HN have gone far enough with math that what I described above wouldn't be considered "tough". But it actually does serve as a gatekeeper for most engineering and hard science curricula, including CS.

[rdouble]

One can get through the required classes without being any good at them. Wannabe doctors take 2 years of chemistry as premeds and promptly forget it all when finals are over.

That said, I've never seen a CS degree that required any more math than a year of calc and maybe a semester of linear algebra. That doesn't seem so hard, one just has to keep up with the homework. Maybe you are thinking of computer engineering?

[serge2k]

Semester of statistics required for mine.

Of course they have since dropped the stats requirement. And the calc 2 requirement. So now it's a semester of calculus and a semester of linear algebra. I guess too many people failed calculus 2 and stats.

[tptacek]

People fail stat and pass linear algebra?!

[geebee]

There's basic "stat" for the social sciences (nothing but arithmetic for means, medians, standard deviation, and so forth). Then there's calculus-based probability, which can be very rigorous. The CS curriculum at rigorous programs tends to require the harder, calculus-based probability. I was a math major, but there were a lot of CS and engineering students in my stats class.

BTW, even with the calculus prereq, I'd agree that linear algebra would typically be a harder class, so I definitely understand why you're surprised someone would pass Linear Algebra and fail Stats.