My Best Education

I often read or hear people asking “Do I need math to study . . ” Allow me to offer some thoughts as someone who has worked in IT for over 25 years. I studied a fair amount of math in college and now regret not getting a double major Math/Computer Science. I was in a hurry, what can I say?

How often do I whip out a slide rule (or the twenty first century equivalent) and solve some formula learned in college? Never. The hardest math I “do” is related to taxes. That doesn’t mean that I don’t “use” math however.

I’ve often benefited from what I call an instinctual feel for how things work, what’s optimal, and the best way to do things. This is not instinct however. This comes from having a varied and strong math background that includes statistics, queuing theory, and algorithmic analysis. What seems like instinct is really the old math training kicking in.

On the job, I’ve worked with many folks with varying academic backgrounds. Some concepts were, to people with weak backgrounds, are simply transparent. They don’t even realize they don’t know the concepts existed much less understand what was happening. In some cases, they could identify the event but know know any of the theory regarding how to manipulate or quantify it.

There is an old saying “You never know what you don’t know” that applies. There are many people working in many different fields who are all successful without many core academic skills. Since they can suceed without good math or English skills does that mean that those skills aren’t important? I don’t believe so. It only means that they’ve limited themselves in ways they don’t even know. In the process, they’ve limited their success and and their lives.

Please don’t let this happen to you.

Tags: Math

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 24th, 2008 at 5:39 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.