Member-only story
A few months ago a friend gifted me the book, ‘A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics’, written by Keremy Kun. I put the book aside with the intent of studying it when I had more time. A few weeks ago I had the time, so I decided to look at the book. When I began reading the book I realised that although the title said it was an introduction to mathematics, it certainly was not any introduction to anything that I have ever seen.
As I perused the tome, I learned that the author, Jeremy Kun, is a software engineer at Google and has a doctorate in mathematics. When I noted to my friend who gifted me the book that, as an introductory work, it was very difficult to read and understand, he had a look at the work and informed me that it was written for master’s degree students. I was very relieved, therefore to realise that I was not totally inept at math, just not experienced enough in my academic pursuits. I don’t feel so bad now about having difficulty taking in the work because I do not have an undergraduate degree in mathematics, computer programming, or computer science.
Nevertheless, I have gone through the work with the intention of reviewing it, so I will cover the concepts that I picked up whilst reading it.
Summation
Summation is the addition of a sequence of numbers. Besides numbers, other types of values can be summed, such as functions, vectors, polynomials, and other types of mathematical objects with addition as their mathematical operation.
The sample code below shows how to sum a list of integers firstly using a for loop and, secondly, using Python’s inbuilt sum() function:-
Product
Product is the multiplication of a sequence of numbers. Besides numbers, other…
