There’s often a skill that seem interesting, but I can’t see doing anything for me in my day-to-day life. What have you learned that was a lot more effort than the payoff was worth?

  • oce 🐆@jlai.lu
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    5 days ago

    Often this kind of math is so specialized you can only learn it on a job with a senior. Adapting the math to discreet computing is also a challenge, but usually there some library doing it for you, like the Fast Fourier Transform.

    • beliquititious@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 days ago

      For sure, even with several people on the team with advanced math degrees and even one former astronomer we still had to rely heavily on the NASA team for most of the math we built in to the program. Though we tried to include as little as possible because the client felt that anyone working in the software for publication would need to verify all of the calculations manually anyway so we gave them a python script tool to let them cook.

      Another project we had was control software for a flow cytometer which did have to bake in a lot of math around particle physics but the physics math was done before I rotated onto the project so I only got a synopsis.