1 - You shouldn't take English. "Math" is U.S. English. "Maths" is British English for Mathematics. The French also write "Maths" for "Mathématiques". In Arabi

1 - You shouldn't take English. "Math" is U.S. English. "Maths" is British English for Mathematics. The French also write "Maths" for "Mathématiques". In Arabic, it's رياضيات. A plural in every one of those languages. I use U.S. English, but I mostly write "Maths". Here's for the nit-pick. Nobody can accuse you of sucking at English since the British, you know, the people who spoke English first, write it that way. 2 - How essential? I don't know and it depends. I personally do Maths for several reasons: * Fun. I enjoy it. I find it beautiful on the rare occasions I understand it, so it's a glimpse of what lies ahead and motivates me to keep at it despite being inept. It's something I'll keep doing until I die. * Preemptive measure to understand things in the future so that I don't have to worry about the Maths aspect of a hypothetical topic. I'm comforted in this logic because it has helped me in the past in finding solutions (for instance, Taylor series to simplify modulation in a transistor circuit). * Some topics require a certain sophistication: I had courses in Control Systems (continuous and discrete) and there's a bunch of topics like Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman, stability, optimal control, etc) that, if you want to understand, require a certain toolbox. You can get by without having that toolbox but you'd only be good at blindly applying formulas and computing results, basically what a computer can do better than you. That's only my naive opinion. I don't even have a job so what do I know.