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Ronald Colyar
Ronald Colyar

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Mathematics is fundamental

Background

A ton of aspiring engineers are operating on the idea that math can be brushed aside when considering the art of software engineering. A ton of these ideas come from the "social media professors" who are trying their hardest to gain a following to bring in more income.

When does reality kick in?

While it is true that you can get away from with basic math if you are tasked with changing background colors and moving basic components around in a codebase, reality tends to kick in when you have to do anything that has ideas deeply rooted in mathematics manually.

I previously worked for a company by the name of Brightidea where me and a few other engineers were tasked with creating a virtual multiplayer whiteboard that could behave similarly to that of other competitors(Miro/Figma etc). Without a deep understanding of linear algebra and computational geometry, I wouldn't have been up to the task of creating key features that directly impacted the companies bottom line.

Another hot area in computer science today is computer vision, and a ton of the work in computer vision is based on gradients, which are changes in intensity from one pixel to another. Gradients go hand and hand with differential calculus by its very definition. You may consume popular libraries like OpenCV to do this work for you, but in order for you to get far(optimize/customize), you will need to understand the process under the hood.

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