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Ask HN: What type of math should the next gen of coders be learning in school?

1 points by kjellsbells ↗ HN
In college admissions, I see evidence that AP Calculus is essentially a lazy proxy for "does the kid have some thinking ability" even when the student is applying for a course that uses calculus very lightly, if at all.

Recent grads I know spent their time wrangling matrices, thinking in hex and traversing graphs. Honestly it all looks very much as if the infamous New Math from the 1960s would have been a better grounding than calculus.

Don't get me wrong, calc is awesome. But maybe middle and high schoolers need stronger linear algebra to be better coders. Thoughts?

5 comments

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inphovore
Statistics.

Modern AI is automated statistics.

A sound understanding of statistics will also help them comprehend economics, finance, political science, and have a better chance of bullshit detection.

version_five
> Modern AI is automated statistics.

Only in the narrowest possible sense. If we're optimizing for AI (which we shouldn't), linear algebra is what's most important, specifically matrix manipulation

an1sotropy
But also still some (vector) calc, to have an intuition for what a gradient is, and how linear algebra informs computation of each step of optimization
SamReidHughes
Taking linear algebra beyond what is already covered in high school is not as useful or essential as material about logarithms, infinite series, and trigonometry. I think the curriculum is pretty good -- maybe it's a bit too interested in conic sections.
trinovantes
You're going to need calculus if you want to work with PID control systems or audio/signal processing