I'm a freshman student in mathematics, and I'm considering whether or not to take a programming course. How important is programming for mathematicians? Do working mathematicians use programs to aid their research?
How important is programming for mathematicians?
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0you can always find a routine with lots of programs or with mathematica or similar you can get your problems numerically solved :D .. anyway if you find interesting watching how algorithm works you could take this course. As a physicist i was ver very bad at programming – 2012-04-15
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26Some mathematicians use programming every day, others never use it in their research. Mathematicians employed outside academia almost always use it. If you are a freshman, you don't yet know what you will be doing later. So take a programming course! [I could continue OT: take a foreign language, take a literature course...] – 2012-04-15
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0Depends on your interest: if you want to move into statistics or other sciences, programming skills will be *very* highly valued. If you want to work in pure mathematics - computer programming will typically not help you with creative proof work. Even if The Four Colour Proof was exhaustively completed by computer, the creative work to come up with the proof was not done by computer. – 2012-04-15
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7In any event: the skills (e.g. debugging, being able to shift levels of abstraction) and discipline that can be acquired though programming helps a great deal in constructing proofs, among other things... and it never hurts to learn programming, I always say. – 2012-04-15
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3You may want to browse some of my answers, especially ones with the [tag:combinatorics] tag; I often use short programs to find initial terms of sequences, explore hypotheses, search for counterexamples, generate tables and graphs, ...; I used to sometimes include code as part of an answer, but after asking [this question on meta](http://meta.math.stackexchange.com/questions/3428/how-to-make-longer-programs-available), I started using [gist](https://gist.github.com) for that. – 2012-04-15
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3I think I could probably copy here my answer to the converse question on Programming, but I'm lazy so I'll just link to it: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/q/136987/48582 – 2012-04-15
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1For what it's worth, I happen to disagree with points from all 8 (at the moment) answers written below. But I agree completely with GEdgar's comment above. – 2012-04-15
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0A [related question](http://cstheory.stackexchange.com/q/8851/1037) – 2012-04-17
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0It's very important for the ones who want a job outside academia. – 2014-06-18