🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sat, 24 Feb 2018 22:58:52 -0600, Charles Richmond
<nume...@aquaporin4.com> wrote:

>On 2/24/2018 1:42 PM, Mike Spencer wrote:
>> JimP <solo...@gmail.com> writes:
>> 
>>> On 24 Feb 2018 08:29:08 GMT, Jorgen Grahn <grahn...@snipabacken.se>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> On Sat, 2018-02-24, Charlie Gibbs wrote:
>>>>> On 2018-02-23, hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com <hanc...@bbs.cpcn.com> wrote:
>>>>>
>>>>>> Personally, I think all programmers, whatever their specialty,
>>>>>> should have a solid background in algebra.  IMHO, if someone
>>>>>> is weak in algebra, they'll be a weak programmer.
>>>>
>>>> That's the stance my university took, around 1990.  You didn't get to
>>>> do computer science until after some hefty maths courses (where most
>>>> of the students dropped off).
>>>>
>>>>> Better still, a solid background in logic.
>> 
>> My post about the prof who meant to make a course in "computer
>> programming" consist of "mumerical methods" wasn't meant to deprecate
>> math as background for programming.  Most or all of the people in the
>> course were majors in the sciences with attendant requirements for
>> calculus, statistics and the like.
>> 
>> In 1964, programmers weren't building GUIs, designing addictive phone
>> apps or data collection scripts for web pages.  (What then passed for)
>> big data -- payrolls, say, or policy holder databases -- were just
>> getting off the ground, still on cards .  So the prof did have a
>> point: If you went into engineering industry as a programmer, you
>> might be asked to determine numerically, given blueprints and material
>> specs, how much a 90 storey building would sway or aircraft wings
>> wobble. Numerical solution of differential equations was the word.
>> 
>> Notably, Atansoff's ABC was then more recent than the first public web
>> server is today.  So the prof could be forgiven for wanting to teach
>> the Rung-Kutta method instead of Fortran.  It just wasn't what the
>> enrollees in the class were looking for.
>> 
>> 
>
>At university I took numerical methods one and two... both semesters. 
>The examples in the book were FORTRAN... although the professor let us 
>use any language for the second semester.  (Except APL...  he wanted our 
>code to do the work instead of APL operators!  :-) )

If he thought that APL operators "do the work" I would like to show
him some code I am currently porting to another language.

>I especially liked Bairstow's Method.  Bairstow's method is an efficient 
>algorithm for finding the roots of a real polynomial of arbitrary degree.
>
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bairstow%27s_method
>
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Bairstow