| Trig class in grade school (or high school) sucks, in a major way. However, I worked as a math tutor for 4 years in college. I tutored both college students and in an after school program for east african immigrants. What I observed in that experience was that people with good trig backgrounds did very well with the mechanical formula manipulation stuff in Calc. They were mostly having issues with proof structure, etc. The students who had a sketchy trig background had problems with proof structure and also had a lot of issues simply doing mechanical symbol manipulation problems. I majored in math and focused on abstract algebra. I don't think rings, groups and fields are very useful to general programming or even computer science. I actually have the exact opposite opinion on the matter. Unless you're going into crypto algorithm research you don't need to know that stuff, you just use a pre-existing library. On the other hand, trig establishes a foundation for stuff like robotics, DSP, computer graphics, computational physics and so forth. Almost anything falling into the traditional "applied math" bin requires you to have gotten trig down cold at some point. However, arguing this is sort of a moot point because I can't think of any elementary or secondary school math sequence where you just skip over trig and take group theory instead. Trig is usually required somewhere along the way and abstract algebra is usually not available in high school unless you're going to a specialized math and science school. Indeed, it's usually not even available in college unless you're a math major. If you have a sketchy trig background and need more practice and inspiration, I recommend: Trigonometric Delights by Eli Maor, for inspiration. Trigonometry Refresher by A. Albert Klaf for practice problems Advanced Trigonometry by C.V. Durell and A.Robson for examples of advanced applications Statistics is very important and totally overlooked by most hackers and even math majors (including myself.) If you have the opportunity to take a good stats class in high school or university, do so. I do not have any good recommendations on self study, but it seems like books on things like Biostatistics often lay the basics out more clearly than general stats textbooks. |