Advice on returning to complete a grad. diploma

[Phred101.2]

Hi,
I'm still thinking about returning to complete a grad. diploma (I have a BSc in CS, with a EE minor). I've got a hankering to do higher math but apparently I need some 2nd yr refresher stuff. And the adv topology, groups and Lie algebras etc aren't available except at 4th yr.
And I'm into anthropology and I guess ergodics, cooperative systems, entropy (in all its forms, esp. informational), and modeling. I have a 4th yr paper in parallel processing from the Dip already.
Any suggests?

 

[mgiddy911]

Are you comfortable self studying the math needed to further you graduate studies? Can you take supplementary graduate classes as math refreshers while you continue the program?
If you return to a CS grad program, then I'm sure you could take a few refresher math courses concurrently. If you want to delve into a math grad program then you may need to brush up in a summer session before you go back to school. What maths have you covered in your CS, EE degrees?

 

[Phred101.2]

Yeah, the thing is, I have a CS deg, and part of a Dip, that includes CS papers (the grad one, and 4 others). That was back when I was keen to further my prospects in the industry. Now I'm more concerned with what I want to learn about, for the sake of it (except I have to do the official thing, and enrol). Math isn't a great big deal, once you get the hang of some of the concepts (what projection is, bijective and surjective mapping, etc) Having learned Latin at high school has been some help in the language side. It isn't exactly an easy subject. I think of higher math as a bit like trying to learn how to play Tchaikovsky, or Greig, or Paderewski on the violin, or learn Bach's toccatas, etc, on a big organ (where you have four or five keyboards, or manuals, and a footpedal manual, all four arms and legs at once). It's just practice, once you 'know' what to do.

I'm not sceptical of online courses, just that I'm fairly sure that up-front lessons (lectures and exams), are the best approach, because of all the other students you are necessarily involved with. It's harder to get that one-on-one stuff over the Web, but the online stuff looks useful, otherwise.

The math I got to was Lagrange and Laplace transforms of transfer functions of a passive network. Frequency analysis, FT and so on. Had to take calc 101 and exp Phys as prerequisites. I've done Analytical Chem, so I know a bit about spectroscopy, also Biochem. The CS stuff is all algebra (lists, mostly), functional algebras (Haskell, Meta, Lisp), algorithm design, architecture, networks, ... not a whole lot of calculus in any CS paper, as a rule. You have to get into some fairly esoteric area, like distributed processing, or AI, before any hard-looking math shows up.