Math Every Day

Written in 2004 right after Steve put down William Aspray's John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing, the essay opens in the embarrassed voice of a working professional who has just realised that the man the field has been quietly plagiarising for half a century could also have invented weather forecasting in his spare time. Von Neumann's range — game theory, the linear-programming machinery behind half of operations research, cellular automata, the implosion device for the atomic bomb, the architecture of every computer Steve has ever touched — was held together by one thing Steve doesn't have: a working command of mathematics. The middle of the essay announces the habit: Math every day. Half an hour a day for a year — algebra, geometry, trigonometry, limits, conic sections, calculus, linear algebra, the works — borrowed wholesale from the way musicians and athletes keep their hands warm. Then Steve walks through his entire CS degree and shows that nearly every course was either invented by von Neumann or built directly on his sequential-machine work. CS was a misnomer; it should have been called Johnny's First Universe. If Johnny had lived another thirty years and built his parallel computer, everything that mattered would have stemmed from math anyway — so the only honest preparation is the habit announced earlier.

Companion to Practicing Programming on the broader question of deliberate practice, and the personal seed of the more public Math For Programmers a year later.