There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?
There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?
I used to work for a software consulting firm and one of our clients was NASA. Nothing exciting, just replacing an expensive proprietary system written in a commercial language with an open source one used for analyzing data from the Parker Solar Probe (PSP) and the then to be launched Interstellar Boundary Explorer (I BEX).
The maths were so far beyond my two time community college drop out, barely graduated high school, self taught background I couldn’t even explain them. Fortunately we used paired programming and had enough mathemagitians on staff I never had to deal with the maths alone. My contribution was mostly UI and data visualization.
I think that the mathematical concepts that I learned were mostly generally useful.
But what was useless was the emphasis on doing work by hand. My particular pet peeve is all the time I spent in calculus classes being taught techniques to do symbolic integration by hand.
I was doing a math project once, working with the husband of one of my calculus professors. He himself was a mathematics professor. I dropped by his office. He had to work something out that involved a symbolic integration and fired up Mathematica. I said “You can probably do all this by hand”. He laughed and said something like, “Nobody who has to do actual work with this is going to waste time doing this by hand”. He was right.
Today, I use
maximato do symbolic integration. It’s in my Linux distro and on my Android phone.Often this kind of math is so specialized you can only learn it on a job with a senior. Adapting the math to discreet computing is also a challenge, but usually there some library doing it for you, like the Fast Fourier Transform.
For sure, even with several people on the team with advanced math degrees and even one former astronomer we still had to rely heavily on the NASA team for most of the math we built in to the program. Though we tried to include as little as possible because the client felt that anyone working in the software for publication would need to verify all of the calculations manually anyway so we gave them a python script tool to let them cook.
Another project we had was control software for a flow cytometer which did have to bake in a lot of math around particle physics but the physics math was done before I rotated onto the project so I only got a synopsis.