> Seriously, calculus? I think that not knowing calculus would prevent you from working in a lot of interesting areas where there is an optimization component.

> Seriously, calculus? I think that not knowing calculus would prevent you from working in a lot of interesting areas where there is an optimization component. Coursera's Machine Learning class is actually a little frustrating because the teacher assumes you don't know calculus, so a good chunk of the course is describing very intricate black boxes that reduce to "take the gradient of the error function". The other big issue with stopping with the math you think you will need is that typically it doesn't completely click until a course or two beyond it. So if you take calculus, you may retain only the vaguest outline, but your algebra skills will be solid. That way when you're lucky enough to find a job requiring calculus you'll just need to review calculus, and not algebra, trig, and calculus.