• Question: How does maths link into your programming / job? Also, what is your most used programming language?

    Asked by 19mtrebilcock on 29 Jan 2020.
    • Photo: Amy Mason

      Amy Mason answered on 29 Jan 2020:


      I mostly use R (which is free to download and play with!) and stata (which is not free but has some really nice features for running large models)

      Maths underpins all of my job to the point where it is hard to answer that question. I get huge sets of data, and I have to decide (with maths) what variables are interesting or useful and then clean up the data (using maths to check whether I am doing it sensibly). Then I run the model (using the maths built into the program), and look at the results to decide if they are sensible or meaningful (maths again!)

    • Photo: Lewis Griffin

      Lewis Griffin answered on 29 Jan 2020:


      long ago I used C and C++ but now I use only mathematica

    • Photo: Maja Popovic

      Maja Popovic answered on 30 Jan 2020:


      I mostly use Python.
      I used to work with C++ a while ago, but not much.

    • Photo: Giuseppe Cotugno

      Giuseppe Cotugno answered on 30 Jan 2020:


      In robotics maths is often used to model the way the robot is moving, also statistics is used to evaluate those algorithms that do learning (they use collected data to generate motions or predictions).

      At work we use python a lot because python has several libraries that can be used for manipulating mathematical formulas, also it has several ready made algorithm especially those related to learning. Additionally, in python is possible to obtain good results pretty quickly so is good for prototyping and trying things out.

      If we need speed, that is when C++ comes into play. It is much slower and harder to develop code in C++ but the result is typically better.

      I personally like more C++ but I end up working mostly in python.

    • Photo: Fiona Macfarlane

      Fiona Macfarlane answered on 31 Jan 2020:


      I develop algorithms that are either probability based or are ways to find solutions to differential equations. I do this in a program called Matlab which has its own pretty straight forward language

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