Math for Programmers: 3D Graphics, Machine Learning, and Simulations with Python

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On one hand, it is true that for 90% of a programmer’s job, you’re not going to be using any mathematics at all beyond basic arithmetic. This book has hundreds of exercises, which are intended to be straightforward applications of material already covered, as well as mini-projects, which either are more involved, require more creativity, or introduce new concepts. These are a sequence of numbers where Nth number is the last two numbers in the sequence added together: Fn = Fn-1 + Fn-2. Whether you're developing algorithms for news apps or designing globally distributed databases, combinatorics helps you calculate all possible combinations or permutations efficiently. I can't even begin to tell you the number of times I've run across hideously complex logic that I replaced with a simple and maintainable finite state machine.

The aim of set theory is to understand the collections of values, and the relations between one another. Have you ever wondered exactly why displaying the contents of memory often gives strange-looking numbers like 0x38FF that contain letters? So this book will assemble a large list of applications of interesting math used in bona-fide production systems.The exponent is a number that identifies how many times a base number needs to be multiplied by itself. But the best thing about Homogeneous coordinates is that they are able to accumulate a number of transformations in a single matrix. As you might expect, this was more difficult than just doing my homework in the first place, but it gave me some useful perspective.

You’ve probably heard people you work with say thing like, “this is going to run in O of N squared, but mine is going to run in O of N, so we should use mine. This means that fluid can flow at any rate in any three-dimensional direction, and that direction and rate can vary across different locations within the reservoir.If you want to work with 3D graphics, cryptography, and machine learning, then Linear Algebra come into play. Strong math skills are a prerequisite if you’re interested in a career in data science, artificial intelligence, cryptography, or virtually any tech field. In the last chapter, you’ll work with digital audio data, using mathematical functions in different and interesting ways. That’s graph theory at work, and while it’s not essential at the beginner levels, it can help you hone your problem solving skills as a coder.

It’s like any other field: no physicist knows all major areas of physics, no mathematician knows all major areas of math.There are a lot of things and patterns you pick up as you go, and maybe I just got lucky and was in the sweet spot of tools developing fast enough to act like a permanent crutch for lack of mathematic ability. One convention I’ve used throughout the book is to represent evaluation of individual Python commands with the >>> prompt symbol you’d see in a Python interactive session. A DevOps engineer is someone who manages a team of software engineers, facilitating the development process to make it more efficient and productive. As a programmer, you will be set tasks and realize you will be asking is this a linear regression problem or a logistic regression problem.

Math skills are more and more important for professional software developers, especially as companies are staffing up teams for data science and machine learning. Being a good programmer is more about critical thinking and problem solving than math skills,” says Josh Knell, the director of instructional design at BloomTech. Optimizing a function--For a function of the form f( x) or f( x, y), you could ask an even broader version of the previous question: what inputs to the function yield the biggest output?If you want to start specializing in graphics or designing languages or algo, then, yeah, you'll need math, but at that point, you'll know what math. Early chapters cover preliminary subjects like number representation systems, set theory, and Boolean algebra, followed by a dive into the field of discrete mathematics, including functions, induction proofs, number theory, combinatorics, graphs, and trees. Boolean is also a fundamental component in almost all programming languages used to implement statements. g. web developers), as they usually don't need to be involved in complex tasks such as game development, competitive programming, and so on. The challenge was that this was not only a complex software project, but the code was very mathematical.