You don't really need much math for SICP. You can learn a few random pieces of math from SICP, and without background that will be harder and you might feel li

You don't really need much math for SICP. You can learn a few random pieces of math from SICP, and without background that will be harder and you might feel like you're missing out, but these are just examples; you can just trust the math works and focus on how they implement it in code, it's structure of the code they want to teach you about. And, it gets better, IIRC from chapter 2 there is much less math. What happens in the first chapter, is that SICP is exploring various control structures (and abstractions over them) before teaching any compound data structures at all. So all it has to work with is numbers. But as number theory teaches us, numbers actually have a rich internal structure, and SICP uses that to make "interesting" examples! (This aspect of SICP is one of the big critiques in the paper http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-htdp-vs-sicp-journal/paper.pdf http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h... which explains the motivations beyond HtDP textbook. In particular, HtDP shows compound data structures first, and uses those to start with explicit methodology for data-directed design of code. These are smart programmers and smart educators, and I trust they made a better intro course. I won't recommend SICP for people who don't know any programming at all. But I feel SICP has a magical voice about the art of programming that HtDP didn't replicate — though I haven't read HtDP, only leafed through it a bit.) So I don't recommend to to cram algebra/calculus before you begin SICP journey! Just start on SICP, and look up math stuff if/as you want. At the beginning, IIRC you'll encounter: prime vs composite integers; base-2 representation of integers; some calculus but it's enough to understand derivative = slope. There is some symbolic algebra stuff later that's maybe trickier, but I think (hope?) SICP is actually a great book to demystify that. --- If you do want to learn math relevant to CS, but mainly for the purpose of learning math: - If you're comfortable with code more than math: A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics by Jeremy Kun. - "Concrete Math" by Knuth/Oren/Patashnik is wonderful. Don't feel you have to finish it! I stopped ~60%.