The Algorithmist is the personal blog of Jim Armstrong, mathematician, algorithmist, and programmer. In addition to blog posts, you can check out Twitter updates at http://twitter.com/algorithmist . Mr. Armstrong may be contacted at theAlgorithmist [at] gmail [dot] com.
In his spare time, Mr. Armstrong lectures on math and programming topics and contributes to the open-source community through GitHub.
His primary business is assisting other programmers in the solution of math, business, science, and engineering problems, in a variety of software environments. He speaks OOP and design patterns just as comfortably as numerical analysis and computational geometry 🙂
His current front-end dev stack is largely modern Angular and Typescript. As an Angular Champion, he writes articles for the ng-conf blog.
Jim Armstrong: LinkedIn Profile.
The Algorithmist 
How much math have you been able to directly apply to programming? I’m curious because I’m currently getting my degree in Computer Science and a minor in Mathematics, and I’m trying to take courses that I could apply – either directly or indirectly – to computer science. I’m in Linear Algebra right now and it definitely has uses for graphical programming, but are there other courses that you recommend?
Nice blog by the way, good content!
Numerical Analysis is probably already required for your CS degree. If not, get that into your math minor. Linear Algebra is a good choice. If either department offers an introductory course in computational geometry, that could be useful, especially if you get into game development. In that regard, any AI courses you could add would be a plus.
Seems like I use some aspect of math, even if it’s just simple algebra or geometry in almost every project.
good luck!
– jim armstrong
I actually wish I would have taken more math throughout college and high school. Since getting addicted to Flash, I find myself loving trigonometry and especially geometry. Never realized I liked it so much! I wish grade schoolers could play with math concepts like we can with Flash. It’s like Lego blocks for you brain!
Elliot – that’s the nice thing about math, it’s never too late to learn!
good luck,
– jim armstrong
Hi! We are very interested in the script to export splines in XML. But the download link to work! Help us please! =)
https://algorithmist.wordpress.com/2007/09/18/spline-to-xml-maxscript/
That script was valid circa Max 6/7. Someone noted it needed updating to compensate for changes in Mascript during the V8 release. I do not have a PC or Max license any more and have no idea whether or not it will work on the current version. If you email me at theAlgorithmist [at] gmail [dot] com, I’ll see if I can find the code and you can give it a try.
thx,
– jim armstrong