Math for Programmers: 3D Graphics, Machine Learning, and Simulations with Python

Product Information

It's a listing of the math that I am glad to vaguely be aware of, without anything that requires true understanding, because I don't have that, but with references to what the people who do have it can do! You can use numeric subscripts to label the various positions it has over its flight, starting with v0 = ( x0, y0, u0). Linear algebra is like a set of building blocks that programmers can use to create advanced systems that can process and analyze data at scale. Overall it has really not affected my life in any way or my career throughout my 15 years as a code monkey through many roles into now a CTO position for the past 5. Skip the mathematical jargon: This one-of-a-kind book uses Python to teach the math you need to build games, simulations, 3D graphics, and machine learning algorithms.

Calculus is a critical tool for programmers who want to specialize in video games and machine learning. If errata or bugs are fixed in the source code online, I’ll include notes there to reconcile any differences from the code printed in the text. But beyond that, you’re also losing out on the ability to understand and reason about your code in a way that will let you see more pieces of the puzzle when weighing design tradeoffs.

I’m guessing that when you learned math in high school, you saw it written on the blackboard and not in computer code. While there are probably hundreds of books and thousands of free online articles on topics like linear algebra and calculus, I’m not aware of any I could hand to a typical professional software engineer, and expect them to come back in a few months having mastered the material.

If you like my casual writing—the complementary half of this space, hence the name—go sign up for that. Studying type theory allow you to better understand what is the role that data structures play in a programming language.My original development editor, Richard Wattenbarger, was also critical to keeping the book alive as we iterated on the content.

I suggest you use Jupyter instead of Python interactive, but in any case, lines with >>> represent inputs and lines without represent outputs. A floating-point number is a number in which the position of the decimal point can move around or "float" instead of being in a fixed position. In fact, many developers respond with a resounding no to the question “Does computer science require math experts? Here at BloomTech, we prepare you to be career-ready, equipping you with all the skills you’ll need to succeed in your field. Some specific domains you go into may need additional math, but that's because of the domain, not because of programming in general.Outside of Manning, I got a lot of editing help from Michaela Leung, who also reviewed the whole book for grammatical and technical accuracy.

My main criterion became the following: this was going to be Math for Programmers, not Math for Computer Scientists. As you already know, a graph is a visual representation of a set of values and these values can be connected. If you want to start specializing in graphics or designing languages or algo, then, yeah, you'll need math, but at that point, you'll know what math. You can even use the duration that a particular used car has been on the market to assess its quality: the longer the duration, the more suspicious you might be.They don’t wear suits and they don’t spend time yelling on their cell phones, but I’m sure many of them own very nice sports cars. So why is logarithms important to programmers> Because it simplifies complex mathematical calculations. If by drilling wells and pumping effectively, a company is able to extract 1,000 barrels of oil per day (the volume of a few backyard swimming pools), it will have annual revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. It was a thing that programming languages were explained in terms of formal language theory, plus some algebraic constructs. The most important part of this equation is the symbol that looks like an upside-down triangle, which represents the gradient operator in vector calculus.