Everyone knows that programmers should be good at math. Largely due to the strong mathematical school that dates back to Soviet times, Russian developers are so confident in competing with their foreign colleagues. Hence the question that many parents who want to teach their children programming have: what knowledge does a child need to start learning? And does this process work the other way—can knowledge of programming help with math?
In fact, the situation is not very clear. Yes, math is actually used in many areas of programming. But on the other hand, many modern languages were specially created with a view to people who are far from the mathematical jungle who use programming to solve applied problems. This lowers the threshold for entering the development world and allows you to create computer programs without really understanding the fundamental principles that make a computer perform certain functions.
The main thing that mathematics and programming have in common is abstraction, reducing some pressing problems to simple models that a computer can work with. Thanks to abstraction, these tasks can be described in the format of computer code.
This kind of work requires a programmer to have several skills at once:
- The ability to understand the context of an urgent task and remove all unnecessary details from this context, to leave the very essence that is necessary to solve the problem;
- Ability to divide a complex system into processes in order to understand how and in what order they take place;
- The ability to create a basic model that includes all the necessary processes, but at the same time leaves out all optional factors.
It is easy to see that all people solve their work problems in the same way, even those who have never tried to write computer programs. Whatever business we take on, we first try to understand it, understand the essence and structure of the problem in order to find an approach that will work regardless of changing external conditions and other factors.
The bottom line is that children who learn to code also gain invaluable problem-solving skills that will be useful to them in any situation, no matter what they do. And in whatever career they choose. We talked about this in more detail in the article “Why your child needs to be able to code”.
Another conclusion suggests itself: if mathematics and programming are linked by such basic principles, developing skills in one area should help in another. This is especially true if we are talking specifically about teaching children to program: a flexible child's brain quickly builds neural connections and easily combines them. The skills that students learn in programming courses will be unconsciously applied in other areas. By the way, this includes not only abstraction skills, but also perseverance, perseverance in solving problems, and a creative approach to complex tasks.
If a child wants to make programming his profession, he will have an exciting journey into the deepest jungle of the mathematical jungle. Data scientists, the main stars of the current information age, who literally know how to predict the future digitally, are fluent in statistics, game theory, matrices, graph theory... the list goes on for a very long time — the best developers learn all their lives.
Let's conclude our article with this idea: you may not know math and become a good programmer, but you can't become an excellent programmer without this knowledge.
