I haven’t got enough time perspective to know what’s useful in the long run. I also just graduated in math.
Fun/easy: a class in ethics and public policy. I find that it’s much easier to deal with contemporary debates from the perspective of political philosophy.
Fun/not so easy: Fourier analysis, complex analysis, random processes.
Classes I wish I had taken: any computer science. I had an irrational fear that I’d be blown out of the water by “hacker kids”—now that I realize there are things I want to do that require more advanced programming, I’ll have to self-teach.
Classes that changed how I see the world: intro econ, Fourier analysis
I had an irrational fear that I’d be blown out of the water by “hacker kids”
Totally rational. If you take a CS course at a major university, you will be, even if you think you’re a good programmer. But you’ll still learn a lot.
Depends on what is meant by “hacker kids,” I suppose, but I took plenty of CS courses without substantial prior programming knowledge or hacking experience and was not blown out of the water by anyone.
Being a good general problem solver / logic puzzle solver / game manipulator (3 innocent spells/items = infinite wishes) seems more important to programming than being a l33t hax0r with prior experience. Maybe these goes away with sufficient experience, but not for the level found in experienced college students.
well, looking at things in terms of a decomposition into frequencies is kind of a universal insight. At least to me. And it inspires different kinds of bases and dictionaries for signal processing. “What’s the best basis to expand this in?” is a question I find myself asking about just about everything these days. Getting meaning from observations is, to me, finding a sparse basis representation.
In other words: it kind of only changes how you see the world mathematically, but for me that’s a big part of the world.
I haven’t got enough time perspective to know what’s useful in the long run. I also just graduated in math.
Fun/easy: a class in ethics and public policy. I find that it’s much easier to deal with contemporary debates from the perspective of political philosophy.
Fun/not so easy: Fourier analysis, complex analysis, random processes.
Classes I wish I had taken: any computer science. I had an irrational fear that I’d be blown out of the water by “hacker kids”—now that I realize there are things I want to do that require more advanced programming, I’ll have to self-teach.
Classes that changed how I see the world: intro econ, Fourier analysis
Totally rational. If you take a CS course at a major university, you will be, even if you think you’re a good programmer. But you’ll still learn a lot.
Depends on what is meant by “hacker kids,” I suppose, but I took plenty of CS courses without substantial prior programming knowledge or hacking experience and was not blown out of the water by anyone.
Being a good general problem solver / logic puzzle solver / game manipulator (3 innocent spells/items = infinite wishes) seems more important to programming than being a l33t hax0r with prior experience. Maybe these goes away with sufficient experience, but not for the level found in experienced college students.
Could you explain how Fourier analysis has changed the way you see the world? I can’t imagine how it would change anything.
well, looking at things in terms of a decomposition into frequencies is kind of a universal insight. At least to me. And it inspires different kinds of bases and dictionaries for signal processing. “What’s the best basis to expand this in?” is a question I find myself asking about just about everything these days. Getting meaning from observations is, to me, finding a sparse basis representation.
In other words: it kind of only changes how you see the world mathematically, but for me that’s a big part of the world.