Discrete mathematics/structures: how do we deal with the late appreciation problem?
David Gries, Michael Eckmann, Ali S. Erkan, James E. Heliotis · 2009
One big challenge of teaching discrete mathematics/structures (discrete from here on) is not students' appreciation of the material but the timing of this appreciation. Some (many?) students ask Why do we have to learn all this? as they study sequences, mathematical induction, counting, probability, etc., relatively early in their college years. Unfortunately, the most convincing answer comes during the subsequent semesters, and it comes in many iterations. Aside from the courses that obviously depend on this branch of mathematics (i.e. Algorithms, Data Structures, etc.), concepts and notation first introduced in discrete math are utilized in technical treatments of computer networking ([1], [5]), computer organization [2], natural language processing (for probabilistic arguments), web sciences (for network structure arguments [3]), modeling, etc.