This is really important. I've seen so many people just thrash at problems because they did not have the math to solve it. It's not so much that they didn't tak

This is really important. I've seen so many people just thrash at problems because they did not have the math to solve it. It's not so much that they didn't take the course or whatever, but that they didn't even understand that there was a systematic way to find the answer. You almost can't be a programmer these days without knowing about data filtering and validation. And I can't tell you how many ad-hoc ways I've seen people try to filter data that was worse than useless - it harmed the quality of the data. So, linear algebra, robust statistics, optimal and non-optimal estimation, and some classification theory will take you a very long way in many jobs. If this isn't clear - PageRank (the original google search algorithm) is just applied linear algebra. Netflix recommendations? Linear algebra. Spam filtering? Bayesian filtering. Medical imaging? linear algebra, Bayesian filtering. It goes on and on. Math is not mandatory to be in the field, but there are a vast number of really interesting jobs which you have no hope of doing without a fair amount of math. This is why I feel so sad when yet another "college is for suckers" thread starts on HN. It takes a lot of concentrated work and practice to develop the math skills and to learn to apply them, and college is the last chance you have to do that in a concentrated way. You just might learn about eigenvectors and invent the next PageRank! graycat always has interesting posts about how he has used in his career - do a search.