A Review on the Relationship between Computer Engineering, Discrete-Math and Graph Theory

Abstract

This review is based on understanding the main concept between computer engineering and mathematics based on two of their most important fields, the discrete-math and graph theory. and answering the question that was asked by many students over the years of working in the university, about the necessity of studying mathematics while majoring computer engineering. Most of the students face the same problem over years for not having the vision to connect between studying materials of their specialization and general ones, in particular between studying discrete-math engineering as in Engineering analysis, and discrete-math as in the Digital signal Processing (DSP), and between algebraic mathematics. Moreover, they do not understand the main idea of the transition between different time or frequency domains, by converting the work in real-time domain systems to work in discrete–time or frequency domain systems. And they do ignore the importance of studying graph theory, in which recent researches have proved the powerful of using graphs in learning tasks, developing an important field of computer engineering, the machine learning, where the standard neural networks (SNNs) have been developed to graph neural networks (GNNs). A figure was concluded at the end of the review to brief the importance of discrete-math developing the relationship between computer engineering in general and graph theory’s role in developing machine learning in particular.