Math in general has always been a weak spot of mine but I was wondering if there were any particular math skills that people have found useful in the field or in production networks?

Nothing complex man, mainly calculating deltas, percentages, and dividing subnets.

Base conversion of course. Base 2, 10, 16.

-Otanx

Doesn't hurt to refresh:

http://www.khanacademy.org/

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I've found addition and subtraction very useful for monthly budgeting and managing a checkbook.

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"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance."
-Jigsaw

Boolean logic concepts are useful, but not necessary.

Build lots of Turing Machines ???

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"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance."
-Jigsaw

well, at a basic level your using Boolean every time you apply a subnet or wildcard mask, which all of us do. It's also used sometimes in scripting which some of us do. It's just one of those things I carried over from being an electronics technician to the IT world that fit rather well.

You wouldn't need to know enough to say, decipher what the output of a digital circuit should be. But enough to understand logic gates I think should be observed by every IT technician.

management math is a good quality to have.

ex: $150,000 worth of gear needs to be purchased and installed with a budget of $90,000.

or

40 hour project needs to be complete in two days!! Use whatever math you need to get a square peg in a round hole.

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http://blog.movingonesandzeros.net/

Knowing math is never bad. Look at Petr Lapukhov. He has a background in math and he's the smartest guy I've seen in the networking industry. It is not necessary to be brilliant in math but you will understand a lot of the concepts a lot better when you get to CCIE level. Things like QoS, routing metrics, STP, are all based on math to some degree.

When I went to the university we used the Dijkstra algorithm to calculate shortest paths on a diagram and so on. You could use that to find the shortest way on a map as well.

So while I wouldn't focus on learning math specifically you will get a head start if you do. Binary and hex conversions should be second nature, espcially now when IPv6 is waiting for its breakthrough.

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http://lostintransit.se

haha, makes me think of the risk assessment formulas,

I have a 4K server, that if it goes down for 6 hours, I loose 200K in internet sales income. Is it worthwhile to
build in redundancy? What is the budget for the redundancy project??

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"If you're good at anticipating the human mind. It leaves nothing to chance."
-Jigsaw