On February 18 2012 00:57 TylerThaCreator wrote:
currently in 2nd year of studying cs undergrad as my major and I too share the pain of useless ass discrete structures/math. all the math majors are in this topic jumping down the not-so-mathematically gifted's collective throat and I really don't understand why. I did fine in my other math related courses, but these classes are just really dense and have 0 use compared to literally any other cs class...
I made it through 1 semester of discrete without doing any proofs and it wasn't too terrible, still rough getting through it. but this 2nd semester is getting completely ridiculous with complicated probability concepts that go way over my entire (aside from very few classmates) class's heads. There is seriously no link to any computer science at this point. just a math class disguised as a cs requirement and a cs class
when I say useless I mean literally all we do is probability, demorgans bullshit etc. How is any of this applicable to anything meaningful?
Wait, your math classes are directly linked to cs? I study cs 2nd year in Germany and as the math faculties (which are really good at our university, among the best in germany even) manage all the lectures we rarely get any direct applications or links to cs at all in most of the lectures. Pretty much all of it is just the logic and the proofs behind the math and often just an abstract view on the applied math that you would see if you had to solve a problem in science or in an exercise. Our calculus/mathematical analysis lecture had no link to cs at all if I recall correctly, and half of the exam were proofs about cauchy convergency, continuity and stuff like that, we were really grateful about any task where you could actually "calculate" something like an integral, a convergency radius or an induction proof without thinking too much about it.
In contrast to that our discrete math lecture was really refreshing and I personally thought most of it was applicable, so I'm pretty baffled how much hate it gets here. Graph theory is as close as it can get to algorithms&data structures, combinatorics is always helpful pretty much everywhere and our lecture also had a good portion of information about algebraic structures like fields, rings, groups etc., also modulo calculation rules and the math behind it, which is used a lot in programming. The basic logical structures with de morgan's rules etc. are also pretty important if you look at how the logic of a computer is built. I don't see how it should be useless for cs.
Of course it wasn't super exciting and I think math lectures are dull in general, but besides numerical analysis it was one of my favourite math lectures. Numerical analysis was the only lecture that had a ton of applications presented for us in the lecture, so most of our class liked it more than the other math lectures.
EPT
).
