Re: Looking for a cartoon

On Jul 6, 7:18 pm, Stephen Montgomery-Smith
<step...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Stephen Montgomery-Smith wrote:
I saw a cartoon on the internet entitled something like "what math
professors want you to believe" and it had one man saying to another "we
are going to loose this contract unless you can calculate this integral
using spherical coordinates - and show all the working."

If anyone has an URL to this cartoon, I would greatly appreciate it. I
want to use it in a talk.

And seconds later I found it!

http://www.math.cornell.edu/~noonan/what-college-professors-want-you-...

Yeah. That's pretty much what you can read on this site every once in
a while. "If you don't know math, you'll end up flipping the
hamburgers at McDonald." Or, I would say, you'll end up becoming a hip-
hop star making gazillion dollars. Or "radio personality" with a
subsequent career as a politician. Making gazillion dollars,
naturally.

And on the same subject, I remember the posting with a question: does
computer programmer need to know math? Naturally the answers was "if
you don't know math, you'll never be a computer programmer, but end up
flipping the hamburgers at McDonald". Naturally none of the those
posting those comments were professional programmers; may be familiar
with scientific/number crunching type of programming a bit but not
with the programming in general. Ironically roughly at the same time
there was a thread on computer-oriented site (forgot which one, may be
osnews.com), and most of the well-known professional programmers
(like Linus Torvald) said "you need to know very little of math, or
simply none". Now we're talking of programmers, not of computer-
scientist types like Donald Knuth.

And yet on the same subject, I remember another completely idiotic
claim that if you don't know Linear Algebra, you can't be a good
dentist. The reasoning was like that: a good dentist must have very
good knowledge of Chemistry (rather questionable claim, to start
with), and a good knowledge of Chemistry is not possible without
knowledge of Linear Algebra. Pathetic bullshit. Why professional
mathematicians exhibit almost Pavlovian's dog kind of responses like
those? Relax. You don't need to be so defensive.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: A Mathematicians Lament
    ... education at the high school level. ... semester of geometry he needs to graduate. ... years of math. ... worked with too many poor programmers and in each case, ...
    (rec.sport.football.college)
  • Re: Hows dot.net doing nowadays?
    ... different types of programmers. ... are often more at home with math as a language ... FORTRAN was the historical language for the "math" types... ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: Hows dot.net doing nowadays?
    ... are often more at home with math as a language ... than they are with human languages.) ... I agree there are different types of programmers (who wouldn't? ... One does find numerous articles on how to select the "Best Language" etc. ...
    (microsoft.public.vb.general.discussion)
  • Re: Sensation! An excerpt from a manual in progress by Daniel
    ... Department of Mathematics ... so fixing bugs simply require adding all known math decently into the system; ... mathematicians just tell them what they need to program, the programmers dont require major math intelligence and certainly no new math. ...
    (sci.math)
  • Re: Theory of programming
    ... >> math, which takes us to develop math skills faster. ... >> if there was a logic behind programming languages, ... >> the same in all programming languages and which helps programmers ... important, how it works, how a modern-day computer resembles it, etc.) ...
    (comp.programming)