This is great advice, I took a similar path out of $BIG_JAVA_CO about a year back. For me it was Functional Programming in Scala Coursera courses and books inst

This is great advice, I took a similar path out of $BIG_JAVA_CO about a year back. For me it was Functional Programming in Scala Coursera courses and books instead of SICP, but what matters is that you find it interesting. With your background in math/physics, the category-theory aspects of FP (Monads! Monoids! Semigroups!) should be easy to grasp. (Look up summingbird & algebird on github if you think this stuff is irrelevant)