Forget Math to Become a Great Computer Scientist? 942
Coryoth writes "A new book is trying to claim that computer science is better off without maths. The author claims that early computing pioneers such as Von Neumann and Alan Turing imposed their pure mathematics background on the field, and that this has hobbled computer science ever since. He rejects the idea of algorithms as a good way to think about software. Can you really do computer science well without mathematics? And would you want to?"
Re:Applied mathematics (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Applied mathematics (Score:2, Informative)
There are of course parts of CS that are less involved in math, but it is still overall a fundamental part.
Not even that.... Computer Science is a subsection of Maths. That's it.... Theoretically, you can complete CS without ever touching a computer.
I was never the best at maths (even though, I beat the best of our class in the final maths exam, but that must have been pure luck. He is a math PhdD at Harvard now, so....). Luckily the parts of maths that are useful to CS, were within my reach ;-)
Re:Math is a subset of the bigger picture of ..... (Score:3, Informative)
How in depth the book goes I do not know, but I do know I've been on about the abstraction perspective for near two decades and communicating it to everyone I can including to those in positions at universities.
I have noticed these last few years there are others beginning to grasp the bigger picture, such as J. Wing of CMU and her "Computational Thinking" perspective http://www.cs.cmu.edu/computational_thinking.html [cmu.edu] perspective and another P. Denning of GMU and his "Great Principles of Computing" http://cs.gmu.edu/cne/pjd/GP/GP-site/welcome.html [gmu.edu] and I'm sure there are others.
Now I see this short book review "Computer Science Reconsidered: The Invocation Model of Process Expression"...yet I have not seen from any of them software or even an outline of such, that anyone can use to explore and apply the presented perspective. And we all know that to really understand something as it applies to computers requires that actual use of a computer in the learning process for verification of understanding.
So, here is mine http://threeseas.net/vicprint/Virtual_Interaction
Its all about Abstraction Physics no matter how you present it or what you call it. The evidence is in the inability to avoid using the mentioned action constants set, with or without computers. Know what you do, in everything you do!
Re:I think the author is making a more subtle poin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:"Informatics" - no, please NO! (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, "Informatics" (which is, as you say, an incorrect term in English) is used in other languages to label "Computer Science". In Dutch it is "Informatica", in German it is "Informatik" and in French is "Informatique" (sorry, I now am at the boundaries of my own language skills). All there translate to "Computer Science".
I have to admit that I prefer the English term, because it says much more than the Dutch, French and German terms. Fact is: "Informatics" is the same thing as "Computer Science".
Go to wikipedia, search for "Computer Science" and see what the languages I mention translate to. (Try "Nederlands", "Français" and "Deutsch" in the left hand column.
$1 billion error at Fannie Mae (Score:2, Informative)
Re:$1 billion error at Fannie Mae (Score:5, Informative)
It was garden variety executive directed securities fraud. Not errors created by poor VB scripts in Excel.
VI. MISAPPLICATIONS OF GAAP, WEAK INTERNAL CONTROLS, AND
IMPROPER EARNINGS MANAGEMENT
As noted in previous chapters of this report, the extreme predictability of the financial results reported by Fannie Mae from 1998 through 2003 was an illusion deliberately and systematically created by senior management. This chapter provides specific examples how senior executives exploited the weaknesses of the Enterprise's accounting to accomplish improper earnings management and misapply Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), and how they used a variety of transactions and accounting manipulations to fine-tune the Enterprise's annual earnings results. Those actions aimed to perpetuate management's reputation for achieving smooth and predictable double-digit growth in earnings per share and for keeping Fannie Mae's risk low, while assuring maximum funding of the pool from which senior management would receive bonus payments under the Enterprise's Annual Incentive Plan as well as maximum payments under other, longer-term executive compensation plans.
To provide context for the technical material that follows, the chapter first expands on several issues raised in the previous chapters by elaborating on the concept of improper earnings management and describing the circumstances that demonstrate that Fannie Mae senior management must have been aware of the evolving official concerns about such practices.
Following those discussions, the chapter reviews the improper accounting policies and control weaknesses that created opportunities for inappropriate manipulation of earnings at the Enterprise. The chapter then describes inappropriate accounting undertaken to avoid recording other-than-temporary impairment losses to avoid earnings volatility. The chapter concludes with discussions of several additional techniques used by senior management to fine-tune reported earnings results.
The actions and inactions of Fannie Mae senior management described in this chapter constituted unsafe and unsound practices that involved failures to comply with a number of statutory and other requirements. Several independent authorities, for example, require the Enterprise to verify and submit financial information. The Fannie Mae Charter Act--the statute that created the Enterprise--specifically requires that quarterly and annual reports of financial conditions and operations be prepared in accordance with GAAP.1 The Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 1992, OFHEO's organic statute, requires Fannie Mae to provide OFHEO with reports on its financial condition and operations.
Similarly, regulations promulgated by OFHEO under that statute require the Enterprise to prepare and submit financial and other disclosures that include supporting financial information and certifications, on matters such as its financial condition, the results of its operations, business developments, and management's expectations.
Moreover, in accordance with applicable safety and soundness authorities, Fannie Mae should have had an effective system of internal controls in place under which:
policies and procedures would be sufficient to assure that the organizational structure of the Enterprise and the assignment of responsibilities within that structure would provide clear accountability;
policies and procedures would be adequate to manage and safeguard assets, and assure compliance with applicable law and regulation;4
policies and procedures would assure reports and documents would be generated that are timely, complete, and sufficient for directors and management to make informed decisions by providing relevant information with an appropriate level of detail; and
policies and procedures for managing changes in risk would be sufficient to permit the prudent management of balance sh
Re:Sure thing Einstein (Score:5, Informative)
Knock yourself out. [theseusresearch.com] Whether you agree or disagree with this guy, it's obvious his credentials put him at a level above 95% of the people criticizing him here.
Re:Lemme guess (Score:2, Informative)
No. [theseusresearch.com]
Re:The True Nature of Computing (Score:3, Informative)
Many people have pointed out that programmers can describe the function of a chip in C several times faster than chip designers can do in Verilog. The point is that chips need to work no matter what system they're used in, while somewhat unreliable software can be ok. I'm releasing a 500K line program to a client this weekend. It has bugs. However, it passes hundreds of designs without failure, indicating most customers likely wont run into them. We built that system with only a dozen-ish man-years of effort, but AFAIK it's more complex than any chip ever designed. Our software methodology converges on reliability, but only to a certain quality point. Going beyond that quality point wastes resources that are needed for the next project. To get to Intel Pentium level of quality would take a team the size of Intel's processor design group.
There are several companies that now directly convert C (or SystemC - basically C++) code to hardware. The idea is to greatly improve hardware design productivity, but it only partially works. The bottle-neck is verification. If the link between the description and the hardware is difficult to see and understand, debugging and verification becomes a nightmare. A C model can be written much faster, but who cares, since it's the verification that takes all the effort? Maybe they can figure out how to improve verification flows, but until then, plain old procedural C/C++ programing with solid coding methodologies will continue to kick pants off of hardware design in terms of productivity.
Re:Oh? And when did you last write any? (Score:3, Informative)
But that wasn't what I was talking about, as I thought was pretty clear from my previous comment. Sure, the rendering itself is fairly straightforward, but how do you decide what to render? And yes, I do do this for a living, and the maths and algorithms involved in serious CAD (for example) are not trivial.
You might be. The rest of us are talking about Computer Science. The clue is in the title of the discussion.
Sure. So tell me again the theory of how to get a compiler to automatically subdivide work and hand out chunks to different threads, so we can take advantage of all this wholesome multi-core goodness the chip vendors are providing us with these days?
Re:Computer Science != Software Engineering (Score:3, Informative)
The only description of the worst-case O(n lg n) Quicksort I could quickly find for free online is slide 16 of these lecture notes (PPT) [virginia.edu], but there aren't many details there. More can be found in the chapter on Order Statistics in "Introduction to Algorithms", 2nd. ed., by Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein.
Re:Damn straight! (Score:5, Informative)
I think he's astroturfing for the pro-patents lobby.
One of the reasons you can't patent software in the EU (and probably many other places) is that algorithms are essentially mathematical constructs, and maths is generally regarded as unpatentable.
So maybe one of the big software houses has decided that the next time they go to court over patents, it might be useful to have a scholarly book saying how algorithms are not in fact math based, and should therefore be patentable.
It would also explain the odd references to circuit boards - which are another arguing point in the patent debate. If it has a physical expression, the argument goes, then it can't be maths.
Re:Damn straight! (Score:3, Informative)
It was well known that men tend in much greater numbers towards genius and retardation. Part of his reasoning was that there may just be a smaller pool to draw from for the very top coupled with fundamental differences in brain development between the sexes. for example, it's now known women have far more white matter and far less gray matter than men do and some people beleive this man be a reason why men tend to excel in teh mathematics realm(due to the differences in how these areas of the brain approach problems). quick link: http://today.uci.edu/news/release_detail.asp?key=
I say more research is needed, but people shouldn't be surprised if they find later on that they basically crushed a good man's reputation because of some idea of political correct bullshit. it's said common sense is just a set of biases we develop by the time we are 18; maybe we'll find one day that men and women are just built to process (and therefore excel) differently.