"Anton Vredegoor" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > And so the cycle repeats itself. We teach our students the world is all > about money, and sure enough, the world is all about money. If we would > continue to keep the interesting things away from most of the people, > by hiding it behind mathematical jargon we end up believing that > functional programming is connected to having a math degree and more > such self serving and self fullfilling prophecies.
I don't think a math degree is needed to read that book, but you do need to know some basic calculus and probability. Maybe also some abstract algebra since error correcting codes generally involve finite field arithmetic. The book doesn't cover those subjects starting from scratch. I don't think it can reasonably be expected to do so. But it's less math-intensive than most books I've looked at about digital signal processing, for example. Perhaps it could be improved by being more explicit about what the reader needs to know, and giving references to other books where the prerequisites can be found. I also don't think presenting the math in Python would make things any easier conceptually. The math in Sussman and Wisdom's "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics" is all presented in Scheme, but it's still the same math that's normally presented as equations, and you have to think just as hard to understand it. Math is a beautiful subject, and is not at all secret or inaccessible. Try to broaden your horizons a bit ;-). -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
