<p>Request for opinion: I am a freshman CS major. As I'm planning out my courses for next semester, the question of what to minor in has come up. With the math required for a CS major, I'm only two courses short of the requirements for a minor. Would it be worthwhile to me as a programmer to take them? Considering how much overlap there is, will potential employers even care? Also, how useful will the extra math be to me as I move on to more advanced programming?</p>
<p>Employers won’t really care. Maybe some specialized companies like mathworks might care, but most won’t.</p>
<p>I keep repeating myself, but I’ll say it again: you should think beyond landing your first professional job and think about what fields you want to get into and what your career goals are and plan your courses accordingly.</p>
<p>Certain math courses may be useful for certain specialties in computing. For example, abstract algebra and number theory can help if you go into cryptography.</p>
<p>Employers generally do not care about minors.</p>
<p>A math minor is probably more useful if you plan to go to graduate school, because you would have fulfill the majority of the minimum prerequisites required for many quantitative majors (Calc 1-3, Linear Algebra, DiffEQ, Logic & Proofs (covering Set Theory, Number Theory, etc, sometimes called Discrete Structures), perhaps Real Analysis).</p>
<p>Out of all of those classes, Linear Algebra and the course covering Set and Number Theory (Discrete) is probably the most relevant to Computer Science, imo. But you probably will have to take them as part of your CS degree anyway.</p>
<p>I’m already required to take Discrete Math for my CS degree. Linear Algebra is basically matrix and vector math, right? I’ve touched on it somewhat in collision detection situations, I think. Does it have applications in CS outside of simulated physics?</p>
<p>I’m required to declare a minor in something here, so if I’m taking 80% of the courses anyway math lets me meet that requirement with just 1 or 2 electives.</p>
<p>If you are going to take extra math, take both majors. A math minor is not going to do much. Besides, what is a math minor?..Calc I, II, III, Diff Eq, Linear Algebra and Discrete Math…not enough to do the more mathematical jobs in industry. Also that sophomore Discrete Math is just the tip of the iceberg in that area. You would really need the junior/senior-level courses in combinatorics and graph theory for insight into Discrete Math.</p>
<p>Like someone pointed out cryptology is big and it’s good to have a course in number theory to prepare you better for crypto. Areas like linear algebra and differential equations are solved computationally so you would need the numerical/computational versions of those courses (and probably numerical analysis too). </p>
<p>The good thing is that if you take the above math courses, they count in both CS and Math, so you could actually enter either route after graduation.</p>
<p>So, sounds like there are plenty of advantageous math courses out there, so declaring a Math minor shouldn’t hurt me. Thanks for the help!</p>