Stanford's not so great. I've seen a good fraction of some of their best work, and it's not too difficult. E.g., to me, Ng is out in la-la land. Diaconis i

Stanford's not so great. I've seen a good fraction of some of their best work, and it's not too difficult. E.g., to me, Ng is out in la-la land. Diaconis is not too difficult but much, much better than Ng. Then some of the best are Royden, Luenberger, and Chung, but none of their books should be regarded as needing some super human effort -- they are all very clear writers. For Stanford 'computer science', mostly f'get about that; maybe in 50 years it will have some significant content. The speech was insulting BS. A lot of HS students work their tails off trying to get into places such as Stanford; sad situation. E.g., they take AP calculus. Total bummer. F'get about AP calculus because the people who wrote that material didn't understand calculus very well. Instead, just get a good college calculus book and dig in, that is, study the material and examples and then work the exercises until understand them and the material well. Work from more than one famous book. There are highly polished college calculus texts going back at least 50 years and no shortages. Working through a good college calculus book is not difficult and great fun. All the angst over AP calculus is just make-work, junk-think, busy-work sadism to hurt high school students by trying to make difficult something that should be fun. High schools and that Stanford admissions guy just like to beat up on HS students. Bummer. Me? I never took freshman calculus! Instead, the college where I did my freshman year was not very good and forced me into a math course beneath what I'd done in my relatively good HS. So, a girl in the class told me when the tests were; I showed up for those; and meanwhile I got a good calculus book and dug in. For my sophomore year I went to a much better college, started on their relatively good sophomore calculus (same text then used at Harvard), did well, got "Honors in Mathematics" and 800 on my Math GRE. Yup, never took freshman calculus. Well, HS students can do the same: Just get a good, standard, popular, recognized calculus book and dig in. Then f'get about AP calculus and either just skip calculus in college or just show up for the tests and move on to, say, linear algebra (say, one of Noble, Nearing, Hoffman and Kunze, or Strang, and, finally, Halmos), theoretical advanced calculus, applied advanced calculus, ordinary differential equations, elementary probability and statistics (race through it and don't take it seriously since will see it all again with much higher quality), measure theory and functional analysis, probability and stochastic processes, mathematical statistics, etc. Pick a real problem, do some research, get a Ph.D. in engineering, then write software for a startup!