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Started programming over half a century ago. The insurance company I was working for gave me a joint life actuarial evaluation problem for which I wrote a Fortran program, picked up from a book. My uni student buddy let me use his ID so I could drop decks into their IBSYS. Turnaround was about a day. My career as a professional manual reader began.

Well yes, my high school maths were in the high 90s - more than my language scores in French, German and Latin with some off curricular Russian. I guess being a polymath helps.

Unless you are doing an engineering or mathematical application you don't need much math, especially as you can just call a function in the vast majority of the time.

I did a number of software products and operating system modifications without using any math beyond arithmetic operations.

I was a resource for other programmers including the odd math PhD.



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