I've met a fair share of programmers who, while they generally don't explicitly say "I hate math," tend to try to avoid it as much as possible. This has to be because I've worked with mainly web and some desktop projects (as opposed to games or scientific computing which clearly use more math). I'll admit that while I have not always been a "math lover," programming has led me down that path. Why? Because everything a computer does involves numbers and math is of course playing with numbers! Casey mentioned in a HH episode how some people go from totally hating math to loving it once they see it used in the context of something (such as programming). Share your relationship with math here and reasoning.
Some reasons/ways I've come to enjoy math with programming:
1. It's easy and fun to incorporate math into all different kinds of algorithms, such as computing prime numbers, fibonacci numbers, Carmichael numbers, etc...
2. It really does help. For example, if I get good with binary math and bitwise operators, I can make more efficient algorithms. In low-level computing, should you choose to, you can pretty much use numbers in place of everything.
3. Math algorithms seem to also be good to test out programming fields such as multithreading - it's pretty easy to put some serious load on the CPU with them and crunch numbers.
4. I've noticed that I can swap out inefficient code with a good mathematician's work and it will speed up an algorithm tremendously. An example was how I had written a very slow algorithm to compute prime numbers and then Martins told me to look up alternative primality tests. These tests allow for the load to be reduced on the CPU as the numbers get larger.
Perhaps I'm biased, but I don't see "I've never been good at math" as a valid excuse. Unfortunately, at least here in the US, math is often not taught properly to suit the needs of students and this results in them feeling that they cannot do it. I was one such student, and when taught the proper way for me, I went from a D- to a 100% in algebra and physics, not missing one single question on the final exams. By some teachers I was told that math "was a major weakness for me" and that "I struggled" but all it took was for me to find the right learning source and/or perhaps be given enough time to understand. Now I sit here, and frankly, my favorite parts of programming are the low-level numbers stuff, from playing with hex, octal, and binary into studying works of Galois, Fermat, Ramanujan, and now getting into cryptography. Anyways, share your stories about how you've used math in your programming journey.