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abstract

What Mathematics Should be Required of Computer Science Majors?

Published: 26 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Mathematics requirements for computer science students vary broadly by institution. The general question of what mathematics should be required of computer science majors naturally leads to more specific questions such as: What mathematics content should be required? What mathematical concepts? Should the theory of computation be required? Should calculus, discrete mathematics, probability, and/or linear algebra? What impact do newer fields such as data science and machine learning have on the mathematics needed or required for computer science majors? What are faculty members doing to integrate mathematics into their computer science courses and does this help some students overcome difficulties learning the mathematics? What level of mathematical maturity should a computer science graduate attain? In this session, participants will share their answers to these questions with the goal of coming to a broader understanding of how mathematics informs the discipline. Through this discussion, we will try to reconcile our idealized curriculum with the practical reality of requirements, dependencies, and limits imposed by our institutions.

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  1. What Mathematics Should be Required of Computer Science Majors?

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGCSE '20: Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education
    February 2020
    1502 pages
    ISBN:9781450367936
    DOI:10.1145/3328778
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

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    Published: 26 February 2020

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    Author Tags

    1. data-science
    2. discrete-mathematics
    3. integration
    4. machine-learning
    5. mathematical-maturity
    6. mathematics-requirements
    7. theory-of-computation

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,787 of 5,146 submissions, 35%

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