Is Computer Science really as difficult as they say it is?

Student Lounge College Life
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<p>One common complaint I've heard from CS majors and ex CS majors at my school is that there is a point in the CS program where the math gets too difficult. They usually say "the math gets too difficult" but don't specify what type of math or why it's difficult.</p>

<p>I'm a math major myself, I've taken almost every 100-400 level math course my school has to offer, and I've never taken a math course where I felt the math was beyond me. Granted, I did feel that analysis and abstract algebra were boring and tedious, but far from being undoable.</p>

<p>I really don't know how CS compares to math in terms of difficulty, but all I can say is that I took a few 100 and 200 level CS courses during my freshman and sophomore year and they were very straightforward. I got As. However, since I never took 300 or 400 level CS courses, I have no idea if those courses are in fact as "difficult" as people have implied they are.</p>

<p>Can someone tell me if 300-400 level CS courses are considerably more difficult than their 100-200 level counterparts? (I can't say the same about math courses, since no math course felt considerably more difficult than the last.)</p>

<p>Also, can someone tell me what's the type of math that a lot of CS majors tend to have problems with?</p>

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<p>what’s probably difficult for them is a lot of people into CS just wanna learn code and create stuff. Not learn a ton of damn math, if they wanted that they’d be math majors.</p>

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<p>the only sort of math EVERY CS undergrad major does is logical stuff, number theory, and linear algebra.</p>

<p>of course in practice theres stuff like image processing … you should google it , <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processing[/url]”>http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_processing&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I wanted to apply to adobe but I also worry that they would expect me to learn something like that…or even know enough to pick it up and gogogo.</p>

<p>but yea, the math is not hard for the required stuff.</p>

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<p>CS majors at Umich don’t have to take Linear Algebra, so not even that is necessary.</p>

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<p>It’s likely not that the CS math is harder than the math math majors go through: but with most CS majors (as was pointed out that at UMich, linear algebra isn’t a requirement) they aren’t exposed to the math enough to be comfortable in it before they’re supposed to be applying it. I know in our intro class, we had to code the multiplication of matrices, but a lot of the people in my class didn’t know how to get the determinant. Even though we had TAs teach it during hours, it really wasn’t enough for people to fully get determinants, and it made conceptually programming a lot more difficult for them.</p>

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<p>That makes sense. I guess the same thing happens with other subjects that rely heavily on math.</p>

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<p>what about the difficulty of upper level CS courses vs that of introductory CS courses?</p>