What The Next Generation Needs Is Math, Not Programming

July 20, 2013 7:36 pm

Math is silently taking over the world. You can’t see it, but it is happening. For a generation immersed in the next photo app success story this might be difficult to imagine – but we live in a world driven by math. Algos drive most of our lives everyday – it is not just NASA or GE or stock market anymore. It is basically everything around us.

Programming is a tool, a very important one. But training a whole generation in Programming alone, ignoring the all-important Math that goes behind most things around us, would be a huge mistake. Yes, you can implement an algo. But how many of us can understand the algo? And how many of us can try to write the algo?

Take a step back and look around you. The apps and devices and screens and all of that – yes, they provide many lucrative opportunities in the short term – but it is the intelligent analysis of information that would be the most critical skill in a decade from now. After the noise around all the hot apps die, the signal will emerge – and it would carry this unambiguous message: intelligent analysis of large scale data is the future. And for that future, what you need is Math, not Programming.

Today, we can get away with ‘knowing’ how Google works without understanding what a ‘principal eigenvector’ is. Tomorrow, we need to absolutely know that. And that is something you cannot understand in a hurry.

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