Ask HN: Programming to learn math?

I am the main developer of the MathPiper open source computer algebra system (http://mathpiper.org). An effective kind of programming language to learn that will help you learn math is a programming language that is part of a computer algebra system. The following video shows MathPiper solving an equation step-by-step:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cy6bwNBkAK0

If you are interested in learning the MathPiper programming language and how this solver works, feel free to contact me using the email address that is in my profile.

Try learning shader programming. It's math based and you draw beautiful visualizations that represent math equations. An excellent tutorial is at http://thebookofshaders.com/

What math would you mean?

Calculus? More on the "building the theory" or "being able to do differential equations"

Algebra? Linear? Group-theory?

Discrete math? Logic? Proofs within logic systems? Completness theorem?

Graph Theory?

There is lots of different parts of math that would be suited to different kinds of projects :-)

The Mathematica book might be what you're looking for.

You can try Functional Differential Geometry by Sussman and Wisdom (which exists both as a printed book and as a freely downloadable PDF file). It is an interesting experiment in teaching mathematics by heavily relying on the computer for doing symbolic transformations, which requires the complete clarity in the notation and the understanding of the material.

One thing you may be interested is numerical analysis.

You can take this course as part of your major (it's usually required, but sometimes it's an elective).

This will guide you through some basic programming and teach you big O notation to boot.

You'll also do analysis on same basic algorithms.

The only drawback in my opinion is that the course is usually taught in MatLab which you won't be able easily translate into building a small web app or something if you wanted to.

Overall, was very happy with the course - served as an intro to programming of sorts.

You asked a good question and I do think programming is a good way to help lean math. This is a good book:

Numerical Recipes http://nrbook.com

Alan Downey's books makes use of programming to get across ideas in statistics, probability and complexity if those areas are of interest.

See here books are free to read online.

http://greenteapress.com/wp/

I think the other way around makes much more sense ...