Going back to school again as an engineering major- I have a few questions.

[haxartus]

Math is huge. Calculus-level math. When I started my first year straight out of high school, my first term math course was introductory calculus (which was easy for me, since my HS math prof took us through that). The second term was advanced calc. And it didn't stop there. Plus, most of your other courses use math; the physics and statics and thermodynamics and all that are all heavily math-reliant.

That's just the beginning. Basically, any advanced textbook will be 90% math. Why ? Because a single equation gives more information than a few pages of text and it is more powerful as a tool. It's like the textbook is encoded in a foreign language and you can't begin to work with it if you don't know the language. You need to start looking at math as a tool that will unlock all this knowledge and allow you to work with it.

[Texan Penguin]

So purely in terms of basic math competencies, should I just be ready to do college algebra and trig? I'm not totally math-illiterate but I need to do a little catching up. I'm probably at Algebra II right now. I've got two years.

I never thought of math as a language though. Are there any good resources that can teach me more about this that are accessible to me right now?