[boothby]

Responding to William here because I was once a student and collaborator of his.

I was long considered "bad at math," a thing my dad said about himself* and an excuse that I readily took on when I got bad grades. I got a career in web development straight out of high school, and that carried me for several years until I got bored and resumed community college classes for enrichment. I took calculus and a beginning algorithms/data structures class my first semester. At the time, I still wasn't ready to jump back into calculus, and only showed up to the algorithms class. I was intrigued -- proofs had a direct application to my life! Later I would realize that programming taught me the basics of rigor and abstraction in a language I was willing to hear.

Thus began my mathematics career. I always had one foot in the computer science, and one foot in the mathematics. The proofs I saw in analysis were... fine, I guess, I got good grades because I did my homework with enough time to focus on it. But William exposed me to a world of computational mathematics that really carried my interest. From there, I learned new classes of algorithms, hairy implementation details, and more. My experience there was incredibly beneficial to my programming experience.

So my path was crooked: programming, then math, then back to programming. It is undeniable that these skills are heavily intertwined. Even if that undergrad analysis course feels like an inapplicable stumbling block along the way. Most mathematicians I know only used calculus to hone their symbolic manipulation skills.

* parents: watch your &$%&@@&$ mouth