Hacker News Reader

I've ignored math prereqs my entire life and turned out fine. If you're genuinely interested, it's not too hard to learn the math as needed. It might actually be a better way to learn, because you're learning is always in service of other learning.

I haven't taken that Coursera course, but in college, I believe only calc I and II are the prereqs for intro to data structures and algorithms. Though I know solid engineers who understand applied CS who don't have a good grasp of math at all.

> It might actually be a better way to learn, because you're learning is always in service of other learning.

Me in freshman calculus: Why are we learning these Taylor series? It's so boring, and I'll never need to use it

Me three years later in upper-division meteorology: It turns out 90% of what we do is numerical methods because fluid dynamics is hard with limited data.

It's definitely easier for me to learn things when I have an application for it.

The math is isn't advanced, any high schooler would've encountered it. Brush up on the basics of exponents and logarithms and you'll be fine.

For the data structure & algorithm courses I've seen, basically none.