puzzling out the proofs for concepts so utterly fundamental to math by myself that it’s like if Genesis 1:3 was And God said, ‘Let there be integer,’ and there was integer
puzzling out the proofs for concepts so utterly fundamental to math by myself that it’s like if Genesis 1:3 was And God said, ‘Let there be integer,’ and there was integer
I barely scraped by in Discrete Mathematics, but it was definitely neat when I understood what the hell was going on. I love that aspect of it–that you’re basically bootstrapping a logical framework for doing math. But boy does it feel bad when you’re taking an exam, staring at the proof prompt, and going, “I have absolutely no idea where to even start.” My experience was that in Algorithms I could at least fudge an answer for partial credit, but I got plenty of big fat zeros in Discrete Math.
If you’re doing CS and enjoy the math aspect, definitely take a gander at a cryptography elective if that’s an option! Formal math wasn’t my strong point but I still loved that class for helping me actually understand the mathematical primitives behind modern crypto. Not math based, but I also enjoyed compilers for that same bootstrappy aspect (admittedly I am also one of those masochists who enjoys working with assembly).
On the note of CS and the rest of math, there are also computer graphics and artificial neural networks.
Computer Graphics was also a lot of fun! It’s amazing how satisfying it is when you’ve wrestled with your twenty lines of GLSL for hours and then you’re finally like, “Holy shit! My teapot is reflective now!!” Definitely gave me a newfound appreciation for people who work with graphics down at that level. I only learned the basics, but it’s definitely a topic I’d be interested in learning more about at some point.
linear algebra was my favourite class in CS. I also loved assembly:)
Ooh, that was another good one! I didn’t find it to be too difficult, and there’s something super satisfying about doing all those matrix operations by hand. It was really cool to take cryptography and computer graphics later on and see just how powerful a tool linear algebra can be!