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Some context for what I am about to say: I read mathematics at university (in US terms I am a "math major") and have worked as a software engineer for almost 30

• rufus_foreman 3y ago
  This varies depending on the university. Where I got my degree, a degree was 120 credit hours and typically 30 credit hours of that would be in your major. For economics, there were those 30 credit hours and also a requirement for calculus (a dummied down calculus class that didn't require trig) and an upper level stats class. For CS, there were 30 credit hours of CS and an additional 30 credit hours of math. You end up with a major in CS and a minor in math. Looks like it would have taken 3 more upper level math classes to do a double major.
  • 3pt14159 3y ago
    Yep! And some universities, like The University of Waterloo, allow you to get either a Bachelors of CompSci or a BMath. And almost everyone at Waterloo agrees that the BMath one is harder and better. They also offer a software engineering course that is also difficult, but with a lot more focus on getting computers and software development closer to the ideal we have in structural engineering. I.e., let's treat these things like the live saving machines they are, and not as something we can move fast and break.
    • saalweachter 3y ago
      That's the rub; no one actually wants to hire "software engineers", for all that that's the job title. They want programmers, who will write code they can sell as quickly and cheaply as possible. Trying to raise a software engineering discipline to the standard of the real engineers would leave you with an employee too expensive to do what his professional ethics wouldn't allow him to.
      • beebmam 3y ago
        Maybe for smaller companies, or if this were 2012. Not sure about this now for FAANG. Engineerieg processes are deeply prioritized these days.
      • tomtheelder 3y ago
        This doesn’t track with my experience in industry whatsoever. In fact, those sorts of “low ethics” programmers are arguably the biggest hiring risk, and large amounts of effort and dollars are put into avoiding hiring them.
      • troupe 3y ago
        Also most of what "software engineers" are asked to work on are not engineering problems. There are of course exceptions, but the vast majority of positions labelled "software engineer" aren't doing anything that would really be called engineering. You are just wiring frameworks together to achieve some goal and reading the documentation to figure out how to make it work.
      • zeedude 3y ago
        > Trying to raise a software engineering discipline to the standard of the real engineers would leave you with an employee too expensive to do what his professional ethics wouldn't allow him to. Nah. The vast majority of software projects are of the lower echelon variety e.g., the slapdash shopping cart web apps. Considering JavaScript is still the language of choice in that realm, engineering rigors can’t exactly be of any real consideration. No, it’s not the expense keeping real engineering away, it’s the culture.
  • WitCanStain 3y ago
    Agree - at Oxford, the CS degree is essentially all algorithms and mathematics, and any coding you do is largely incidental.
    • arethuza 3y ago
      When I did a CS degree at a Scottish university in the 1980s it definitely felt that the core of the course was maths (both engineering maths and a lot of different theoretical CS subjects) and while we did a lot of programming that was really only there to explore the concepts. There was very little emphasis on how to write code or good development practises - you were expected to pick those up by yourself as you went along. My only real criticism of the course I did that it was just maths and CS for four years - which meant there was very little flexibility for people to do other things for the people who wanted to change subject.
• WastingMyTime89 3y ago
  > Without hesitation, computer science is certainly not a mathematics major. Properly taught it definitely is. The issue here is that an average undergraduate mathematics major in the USA learns a ridiculously low amount of mathematics so I guess a CS one does even less. I did more maths during my two years of prépa in France that the American who majored in mathematics I met during my postgraduate study.
  • mistrial9 3y ago
    schools vary widely in the USA, so, no.
    • WastingMyTime89 3y ago
      That’s why I said average but, anyway, I did my postgraduate in Oxford where most of the American didn’t come from middle of nowhere universities and they were all frankly disappointing in mathematics. My two cents.
  • zer8k 3y ago
    BSc CS is an accredited degree in the US. It is very math heavy. Most of my peer graduated with minors in mathematics. Majority of us did discrete mathematics for most of our degree and numerical analysis in electives. Abstract algebra if you took advanced crypto courses. I don't know a whole lot about diffyQ but I can swing it if I read a book.
• solatic 3y ago
  > an enormous... subject I think you're getting to the crux of the point. A few years in university (for undergrad) is not nearly enough time to cover the entirety of mathematics. The sheer fact of time constraints requires a survey and a selection of a fraction of the field for study. I would argue that economics degrees are also, essentially, math degrees for the same reason. Neither economics degrees nor computer science degrees will cover the same topics as a "pure" mathematics degree (or else they would simply be known as mathematics degrees), and I will grant to you that they are "applied" math degrees if I must. But the point remains: a "pure" math undergrad degree cannot include all of mathematics, and thus is perhaps best renamed as theoretical mathematics, commensurate with branding economics and consumer science as "applied".
• a_wild_dandan 3y ago
  I think you're essentially both correct/insightful here, just fall on opposite semantic choices. Yes, software engineering continues its creep into CS curricula. So is the rigorous sub-branch of mathematics called CS being unduly polluted? Or has the CS discipline itself changed meaning? I personally tend toward the latter, as language is a constantly shifting hodgepodge of subjective conventions. But that's just like, my opinion, man.
  • EoinB 3y ago
    From my observations of being in the industry so long, I would tend to agree that the content of computer science degrees has changed since the 80s and 90s. I should have made a clearer distinction between theoretical computer science and a computer science degree. Theoretical computer science is a topic in applied mathematics but a computer science degree isn't, typically composed only of classes in theoretical computer science. The extent to which it is varies from course to course and from university to university. In much the same way as in a mathematics degree there are pure maths topics (number theory, analysis, graph theory etc.) and applied topics.
  • tuatoru 3y ago
    Your opinion is, like, fine. I expect that eventually we'll have "applied CS" and "pure CS", as with mathematics. And statistics. And possibly architecture. (In engineering, pure engineering is "engineering science", it seems.) "Eventually" is doing a bit of work there. It might take a hundred years.
    • freetime2 3y ago
      This already sort of exists. Someone in another comment references their degree in “Computer and Information Science”, which is more practical and less math heavy than CS. And I believe several of the University of California schools offer degrees in “Game Design”.
    • deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
• mistrial9 3y ago
  economics makes heavy use of statistics, so it is an unfortunate example to use for "what is math"
• freetime2 3y ago
  > Mathematics is an enormous and ancient subject. The maths that a CS student is exposed to is really a very small sliver of a few topics I would say the same is true of most undergraduate math majors. The Computer Science program was part of the College of Science and Mathematics at my university (not the School of Engineering). The stated goal of the program was to give students enough of a theoretical background in math and computer science to pursue an advanced degree in CS. Most students probably had other ideas, but that was the way the curriculum was structured. And there was enough overlap between Math and CS majors that most CS majors ended up with enough credits for a dual CS/math degree pretty much by accident. To be clear I am under no illusion that meeting the minimum requirements for a math degree makes me a great mathematician. But neither were the majority of “pure” math majors in our classes. In fact, I would say the CS students tended to be stronger in math, as that was the more competitive major at my university.
  • ImprovedSilence 3y ago
    My large state school had a computer science degree, and a computer engineering degree. The latter being much more mathematically rigorous, and in the college of engineering, not college of science (and sort of adjacent to an electrical engineering degree). It’s noticeable in the grads it puts out too. If you need a programmer that can handle and understand math, get one with the engineering degree.
  • Retric 3y ago
    Undergraduate Math degrees should cover a much wider range of mathematical topics. Many schools don’t have enough students to offer many courses exclusively for Majors so that often blurs the lines. Topology and a few others may make the cut, but it’s much easier to share requirements with other programs so a Math degree may include courses that are required or attract students from a Physics, CS, Engineering, Music, Economics, Chemistry, Philosophy, History, etc degrees. Depending on how you set it up “History of Mathematics” could attract students from several different majors which means you can offer it more often etc. But the same applies in reverse so CS programs can end up with more overlap than ideal.
  • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
• User23 3y ago
  I largely agree about the major in the USA. I disagree though that the study of what can be computed is anything other than a discipline of mathematics. Computing science itself never requires stepping outside discrete mathematics, which of course means the majority of math just isn’t necessary to do theoretical work or write correct programs. But then what mathematician today has mastered the entire field? It’s too big, you have to focus. However, there’s considerably more to it than that. With a few rare exceptions, the overwhelming majority of CS programs in the USA are “telescope science” and not astronomy. One of the more telling, and to my mind obnoxious, evidences of this is how even in the academy the CS types literally appear to believe that “formal” means machine checkable while at the same time balking at learning basic first order predicate calculus to actually specify what is to be computer by a given program. Clearly they are studying the machine and not the mathematical sub-discipline. I emphasize the USA, because having done many many FAANG technical interviews there is a discernible pattern of graduates from continental European CS programs being considerably more mathematically literate.
  • EoinB 3y ago
    I, unfortunately, wasn't very clear, in my original comment, that I am making a distinction between theoretical computer science (the topic); and being a computer science major. Theoretical computer science is generally regarded as a topic in applied mathematics. However, it doesn't follow that, therefore, a computer science major is basically a mathematics major. Theoretical computer science (the topic) is a component of a degree in computer science. How large of a component it is varies greatly from university to university and, perhaps, has changed over time.
• Spooky23 3y ago
  It depends on where you went to school and where it came from in the school. I went to large state school where the CS department was part of and eventually split off from the math department at some point. Their original degree was computer science and applied math. It was very much “math with computers” when I was there 25 years ago. I imagine things have changed a lot, but schools have a variety of approaches and states of transition that are probably difficult to know about.
• unethical_ban 3y ago
  When I tried CS my freshman year in the 00s, the degree was one course away from a math minor; it was basically a given that a CS major would leave with a minor in math. And like the parent said, one of my professors emphasized that computers were to comp sci what telescopes are to astronomy. So perhaps they are not as educated as a Mathematics PhD, but it is more than taking a python course. Even at the time, however, there were divisions in the faculty about the core curriculum, since we had two graduate CS tracks: software engineering and theory.
• ryaneager 3y ago
  As a CS Major, who doesn’t know how he passed linear algebra, I agree. CS is close to a minor in Math, when I attended only ~4 extra math classes were needed to qualify.