Friendly warning to those who might not be aware: the vast majority of comments below posts like the above will be left by (otherwise intelligent) programmers who think mathematics is a closed system where one attempts to solve endless Olympiad-type problems. I wouldn’t take any of it seriously at all. Better to listen to what those who actually know what the subject is about have to say.
Unfortunately, mathematics (especially pure mathematics) is by its very nature very, very poorly understood by those who haven’t worked as a mathematician. Even worse, those who don’t understand are seemingly not at all aware of their misunderstanding and are entirely confident in their (very wrong) characterisation of the subject.
Actually, if you were to convert most software into mathematical notation it would look incomprehensible. We are not interested in gatekeeping as much by making things look more convoluted than they need to.
This is a great point. When I was learning machine learning in the early 00s, there were many papers where I would struggle to understand exactly what the mathematics was trying to communicate, but where I would look at the matlab source code and say to myself "that's all?"
xanderlewis · · focus · HN ↗
Unfortunately, mathematics (especially pure mathematics) is by its very nature very, very poorly understood by those who haven’t worked as a mathematician. Even worse, those who don’t understand are seemingly not at all aware of their misunderstanding and are entirely confident in their (very wrong) characterisation of the subject.
colonwqbang · · focus · HN ↗
kmaitreys · · focus · HN ↗
password54321 · · focus · HN ↗
moomoo11 · · focus · HN ↗
literally what software engineers were doing for decades though
software is mostly just simple math, for the most part, until you need to do something more complex for some hairy algos lol
password54321 · · focus · HN ↗
CuriouslyC · · focus · HN ↗