Mathematics for software developers

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Here are the great 2D histogram representations that someone worked up:

http://cns.bu.edu/~gsc/ColorHistograms.html



Not being a graphic artist, and not normally dealing with colors in HSB or HSL, but rather RGB, I didn't have a firm grasp on why those histograms were deceptive. Now I do.

Some programming is geared toward gaming or simulation. And in these fields, knowledge of math is quite important. I studied game programming, and one of the subjects was mathematics and physics for game developers. The subjects were a little trigonometry, Newtonian physics, matrices and probably more, don't remember all the subjects. But besides these subjects, Boolean algebra, as stated by others, is very important.

Furthermore I think mathematics teaches you to take what knowledge you have, and apply it to solving new problems. I did struggle a bit with maths, but that was mostly because I never really took the time to understand the basic subjects. But I think mathematics has some things in common with programming in that you solve problems. At least that's what I love about programming; solving problems.

This question is not easy to answer, because software developers work in a lot of different domains. Someone like myself uses a lot of set theory and SQL. Other people in hard science use approximation techniques to do numerical analysis. Game developers and biology experts use more linear algebra. A lot of software is built at such a high level now that developers don't directly deal with the underlying math concepts. (Even something like linear algebra in R is at a really high level.) So the answer is the usual "it depends" since ten different software developers will give you eleven different answers. A more useful question is - "to develop software for problem domain <insert problem domain here>, what sort of math is required?"