07-09-2007, 04:52 PM
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 | PT Admin | | Join Date: Jun 2007 Location: In front of computer...
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 Want to Be a Computer Scientist? Forget Maths
I found out that this article is really interesting.. what do you guys think? 
I got this article from ACM's Tech News
Math is useless...?  *I personally say I'm too lazy to do the HWs lol...* Quote:
Want to Be a Computer Scientist? Forget Maths
iTWire (07/05/07) Corner, Stuart
A new book aims to dispel the belief that mathematics is a necessary foundation for computer science and programming, specifically for the algorithms used in computer science. Theseus Research CEO Karl M. Fant says the notion of the algorithm "has been largely ineffective as a paradigm for computer science." Fant says because mathematicians, notably John Von Neumann and Alan Turing, were involved in the early development of digital electronic computers in the 1940s, a mathematical model of computation was installed, including the algorithm, in the early days of computer science. Fant argues that the mathematical perspective is creating and approaching questions from the wrong point of view. "Mathematicians and computer scientists are pursuing fundamentally different aims, and the mathematician's tolls are not as appropriate as was once supposed to the questions of the computer scientists," Fant says. "The primary questions of computer science are not of computational possibilities, but of expressional possibilities. Computer science does not need a theory of computation; it needs a comprehensive theory of process expression." The idea of "process expression," according to Fant, is a common thread that runs through various disciplines of computer science. "The notion of the algorithm," Fant concludes, "simply does not provide conceptual enlightenment for the questions that most computer scientists are concerned with."
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