Today my day has been consumed by a mathematical problem given to me by a potential employer. I think it’s one of the Evil things that Google has given us, Computer Science exam questions for programming jobs.
You might be able to prove some sort of understanding about problems that people picked up in University, but what about those poor sods like myself that learned programming through hard work? Ah well better brush up on your Factorials, Diophantines, Combinatorics and Permutations Mathematics.
Although I don’t know about other programmers, I’ve very rarely ever had to use anything more advanced than basic calculus and even then it’s mostly for graphical and data storing algorithms. Your basic programmer should be a good engineer first, a good scientist second and a good mathematician third. At least in my experience, so why oh why am I spending so much time on this?
/moan