> They seem to agree on one thing: from a workaday perspective, math is essentially useless.
The creator of Dilbert advocates stacking, namely learning multiple skills and combining them to achieve better results than any single skill can. His advice applies to maths as well. I work on distributed systems as a generalist, yet I find maths, time and time again, career changing. A few typical examples: queuing theory that helps improving latency of my services by more than 10x. Statistics to identify patterns in data, which led to a new product. Time series analysis that led to a new system. Data mining and information retrieval in search and recommendation for continuous improvement of my search product. Linear algebra, calculus, and combinatorics as foundations to identify or prove certain properties of my systems for later optimization. And in general, the ability to understand papers (or at least know what to learn to unblock myself) to stay on top of what's going on in exciting fields.
One does not necessary need maths to build systems, but boy it is satisfying and career-rewarding when I actively look for real problems that scream for some maths. What's most amazing is that we don't even need graduate-level maths. Entry-level college maths play wonders most of the time.
The creator of Dilbert advocates stacking, namely learning multiple skills and combining them to achieve better results than any single skill can. His advice applies to maths as well. I work on distributed systems as a generalist, yet I find maths, time and time again, career changing. A few typical examples: queuing theory that helps improving latency of my services by more than 10x. Statistics to identify patterns in data, which led to a new product. Time series analysis that led to a new system. Data mining and information retrieval in search and recommendation for continuous improvement of my search product. Linear algebra, calculus, and combinatorics as foundations to identify or prove certain properties of my systems for later optimization. And in general, the ability to understand papers (or at least know what to learn to unblock myself) to stay on top of what's going on in exciting fields.
One does not necessary need maths to build systems, but boy it is satisfying and career-rewarding when I actively look for real problems that scream for some maths. What's most amazing is that we don't even need graduate-level maths. Entry-level college maths play wonders most of the time.