How To Excel Additional Mathematics?

Do you need to excel in Mathematics to work in the IT industry?

• Answer:

  NO. Absolutely not. This answer is related to an Indian professional environment, I don't know about the situation elsewhere, but I guess it would be radically different. I'm a CS graduate of an Indian institute. I have worked at a software giant, say M. I thought my work experience would be fun as I would be in the company of geniuses. Now  I have a huge interest in mathematics, particularly abstract algebra and am big fan of Serge Lang. So I have a pretty decent background in mathematics( unfortunately, self-taught, because my university did not offer these courses). When I joined this company, I was disappointed to find that not one of the people there, including top-level managers, had any understanding of the theoretical basis of computer science. They knew their technologies extremely well, much better than I of course, but they did not have the slightest interest in the truly beautiful areas of CS such as complexity theory, algorithms, graph theory. They had a high school perspective of mathematics- i.e. they viewed mathematics as merely useful for solving differential equations, etc. I doubt any one of them had even heard about Lebesgue measures or integral domains, nor did they have the ability to understand such concepts. In an IT company or even a software company, you don't really need to know mathematics. You don't have to learn RSA, you can just view it as a black box method for encryption. I guess that the only maths needed at an IT company or a software company, and particularly an Indian one, would be arithmetic and maybe knowledge of one or two algorithms. The black-box mentality of the people at these companies towards mathematics disgusted me. I have no intention of joining any such company. If you don't mind learning the teensy-weensy details of a new database, programming language etc. every few months, go ahead and join these companies. If you love CS and mathematics, please don't waste your passion working in such places.