A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics

1. Why’s Poignant Guide to Ruby 2. Practical Common Lisp 3. A Programmer’s Introduction to Mathematics 4. Data Structures and Programming Design in C 5. The Art of Agent Oriented Modeling

I remember Pi in the Sky by John Barrows very fondly. It has more of a focus on geometry and logic. A Programmer's Introduction to Mathematics by Jeremy Kun is wide ranging and appropriate if there is also interest in programming. Nature and Growth of Modern Mathematics by Edna Kramer is a wonderful book if history is a passion as well. Elements of Mathematics by John Stillwell is a broad overview of subjects. It has a crisp mathematical feel to it. Vector Calculus, Linear Algebra, and Differential Forms by John & Barbara Hubbard is a beautiful introduction to the multi-dimensional aspects, but it is a book that should happen after knowing one dimensional calculus. . If your child hasn't been exposed to Guesstimation, then a book on that is highly recommended. The book with that title by Weinstein and Adams is a nice guide to investigating that realm. If the child does arithmetic from right to left, as is sadly too common, the book Speed Mathematics Simplified by Edward Stoddard is a great remedy for that. Everyday Calculus by Oscar Fernandez could also be worth a look.

You don't really need much math for SICP. You can learn a few random pieces of math from SICP, and without background that will be harder and you might feel like you're missing out, but these are just examples; you can just trust the math works and focus on how they implement it in code, it's structure of the code they want to teach you about. And, it gets better, IIRC from chapter 2 there is much less math. What happens in the first chapter, is that SICP is exploring various control structures (and abstractions over them) before teaching any compound data structures at all. So all it has to work with is numbers. But as number theory teaches us, numbers actually have a rich internal structure, and SICP uses that to make "interesting" examples! (This aspect of SICP is one of the big critiques in the paper http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-h... (http://cs.brown.edu/~sk/Publications/Papers/Published/fffk-htdp-vs-sicp-journal/paper.pdf) which explains the motivations beyond HtDP textbook. In particular, HtDP shows compound data structures first, and uses those to start with explicit methodology for data-directed design of code.…