<p>Some co-workers of mine were just discussing programs, etc and someone who graduated from UC-San Diego said that Differential Equations is being removed from the CS program starting this fall.</p>
<p>Personally, I think that particular Math course can be removed.</p>
<p>Are you TRYING to provoke AuburnMathTutor?</p>
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<p>Yes…no, joking.</p>
<p>I was one of those Math/CS types also. Unless you plan to take the computational versions of ODE/PDE or plan on doing scientific software development in your career, I can see skipping DiffEq. Calculus III has also being removed from CS programs. The ONLY issue I have with removing DiffEQ is that DiffEq does interact with Linear Algebra and Linear Algebra MUST ABSOLUTELY be in a CS program.</p>
<p>is this a joke or what? removing diff eq from CS?
hell, the school might as well remove all the humanity/non-related bs classes for engineers.</p>
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<p>LOL…welcome to the new-age CS programs.</p>
<p>AFAIK diffEQs have never been in the required curriculum for CS at my university. recommended, but not required.</p>
<p>We do not require Diff Eqs and I do not see a reason why CS majors need to know them.</p>
<p>" The ONLY issue I have with removing DiffEQ is that DiffEq does interact with Linear Algebra and Linear Algebra MUST ABSOLUTELY be in a CS program."</p>
<p>CS at UMich doesn’t require Linear Algebra. They really don’t. And they require Calc III and DiffEQ. </p>
<p>Everyone takes Linear anyway though.</p>
<p>Discrete math is another absolute along with linear algebra. Take that out and you might as well eliminate CS altogether.</p>
<p>you all make good points and I think that most of the math taken as a CS student is useless…It should be tailored so that it isn’t the same as the usual engineering major (which deal with physical problems)</p>
<p>in my opinion, if I ran all CS departments in the world:
-diff. eq. should be taken out completely or replaced with a course that packs less ‘water fills the tank at dr/dt’</p>
<p>-require discrete math (though most schools already enforce this)
-linear algebra should be required and focused on difficult computational problems (or take regular linear algebra as an equiv.)
-require number theory
-require some sort of higher level discrete course or easy intro algebra course</p>
<p>Discrete math would include: Information theory, logic, combinatorics, and graph theory.
Classes should also include number theory and group theory as well as operations research, probability, and possibly game theory. I would also require financial mathematics.</p>
<p>Perhaps there is value in having a broad science education for it’s own sake. Just because someone studies CS doesn’t mean they are going to be a programmer.</p>
<p>“Perhaps there is value in having a broad science education for it’s own sake.”</p>
<p>I think this is supposed to be in high school… Did we just take 4/5 years of science for nothing?</p>
<p>I feel math courses taken by CS majors are more beneficial and memorable if paired with a course that applies it in some way. Linear algebra and computer graphics, discrete math and algorithms, probability and AI, etc. Calculus is tricky to place because it’s mostly continuous and CS is, well, often discrete. I may have used it in computational geometry somewhere, and I remember seeing it a bit in an image processing / multimedia class. My undergraduate program did not require differential equations, though I haven’t needed it (or maybe I just didn’t realize I needed it somewhere?) as a grad student yet. </p>
<p>One thing I will say as a grad student in CS is that I constantly wish I had a more solid mathematics background. I’m not sure if that’s a result of my undergraduate preparation or common for CS grad students; there’s just not enough time in a day!</p>