Building Products : Importance Mathematics and Programming

Combo of Mathematics and Programming sounds a whole lot complex but relax yourself as I won’t be talking too much of gibberish but a simple, example driven approch to explain the things to you.

When you hear words like Mathematics and programming, you get alien feelings. At least I did in my early engineering days. And that’s really not surprising. Even Chinese language seems alien but if you spend 4 years in china, it will start looking familiar. 

So before you conclude that Math is hard or programming is hard, first ask yourself, how much time have you actually spent by yourself on those things.

If you haven't, it will definitely seem hard. Not just math or programming but if you don’t spend time on a particular thing, it will in fact seem hard.

In one sentence, Mathematics is a language you haven't’ spent enough time on by yourself and hence it’s hard.

It's not hard by nature, its hard by your limited exposure towards it.

But what Math actually is and why it’s a backbone of programming?

Let’s do a meditation session. Imagine your mind is empty, the current year is 300 BC and there is no such thing as Math and Science.

How are you going to count things? How can you tell someone that there are 4 people in your family or you have 10 acres of land?

So what can you do?

You can take 4 small sticks and represent each stick with each member of family and there you go, you invented a number system! Share those no. of sticks with anyone and they will know how many people you have got in your family.

But this system needs sticks and that’s the problem. You can’t get stick for every single person on planet earth. You need to develop something that can be represented on a piece of paper and your memory also needs to know what that representation is.

When you think about it for a while, you will know math is just a language to count things just like Hindi is a language to talk about things. 

Math is a just a representation. Representation word is itself made from re and presentation. Re means again and you know what presentation means. Express anything in different form and you can call it representation. 

Now, there are 4 primary fields in Mathematics. Geometry, Algebra, Probability and Calculus.

Geometry is the Mathematics of Shapes

Algebra is the Mathematics of relations

Probability is the Mathematics of Chance

Calculus is the Mathematics of Change

Due to this, almost everything can be expressed in mathematics. That’s why Mathematics is called the language of the Universe.

Let's talk programming. Programming by it’s nature means to create a thing that will do a certain task.

Calculator is a program.

Camera is a program.

The Gas and mixer in your house is a program.

Every program is a pattern and every pattern can be represented using the language of numbers called Mathematics.

If you have seen the movie interstellar, you might have heard about Morse code. It’s a code language represented in dots and dashes. Where A means one dot and one dash and so on. Again, it's nothing but a pattern that someone figured out for us!

Every code language needs a mathematical representation to make it work. The machine language, the only language understood by your computer is made up of 0’s and 1’s.

From that 0's and 1’s to human understandable languages like Python and Javascript we have came too far. The abstraction is too much for a beginner in programming and that's why programming might seem hard to them.

But that’s the combined power of programming and Mathematics and it’s the reason why we have rockets flying into space and robots talking like humans.

Anyways, this is how everything is powered and will be powered. 

In the end, mathematics is all about expressing patterns and programming is about putting those patterns to work to create the products that can solve the problems you face as a company or as an individual.