Does Math matter to become a great programmer?

A degree is not essential. It may give you a boost but a degree in engineering will be unlikely to help you program better. Numbers are used a lot in cryptography and there is a lot of percentages and pixel measurement in web design but your lack of math can likely be overcome. It will probably slow you down in some ways but it is not essential for everything.

that's a good question. In my experience programmers tend to like math, and the kind of personality it takes to like math helps in learning programming (eagerness to achieve solutions to difficult problems), plus some teachers enjoy using math problems in their computer programming classes, and obviously programming languages are like calculators on steroids with all you can do, but there's so much in programming and Webdev that's not related to math. I'm finding rather, that attention to detail and creative thinking and an insatiable intellectual curiosity trump math. I'm not a programmer yet, but a longtime web designer type (hosting, seo etc.) currently revitalizing the programming skills I do have. I went back to school a long while back taking Calc 1,2 3, statistics, html, C++ Visual Basic. I found what I liked and made money in web deveopment and didn't use the math much but I love it.

Find your area and grow I'd say. Learn to like math, but you said you love to code. Totally cool, so do that and make a lot of math teachers jealous. Many of them wish wish they could code.

I've wondered the same thing for years, I asked a programmer friend, her answer, discrete math helps her come up with good algorithms to tricky issues. And to get to discrete math, you need calculus.

For becoming great programmer I think that some knowledge of math matters. As James said if you want to improve your programs (make them faster) you need to come up with a good algorithm. The other day I implemented a small function that worked ok when the input was small, but soon the input to function increased exponentially the whole thing run like crap. The problem with math for the most of us is that received a bad stigma in high school. Usually it was poorly taught, boring stuff with a lot of exercises. I rediscovered math with some great courses online that can be very interesting to take (a couple of times I said to myself: woah, this is cool to know). Plus you aren't under the pressure that someone is waiting for you at the end of the course with a bunch of test that you have to complete with no formulas. My goal now, with math, is to try to understand a bit more (yes I was a bit lazy high school ;) ). So I guess the answer to the question if you need a degree would be: no, you don't.

Obviously, if for programming one means creating some effects with JavaScript to make the page cool and similar things the whole doesn't apply.