>>Having lived in FL for a number of years I know the schools (at least in south FL) are not very good. I remember helping my bosses daughter with her math homework one day and the whole time I kept thinking to myself - geeze we learned this three years ahead of this at my school. At first I thought perhaps she was in a remedial class - but nope she was right on target with all the students. Perhaps those students are now college age and just can't do the math they need to enter a CS program.
>
>I haven't taken a CS program, I'm a B.A.Sc in Mechanical Engineering. But, from what I've gathered, you don't really need any advanced math for CS (although that could well be a prereq for college admission).

As far as I'd seen, having a basic grasp of mathematics is essential, as well as ability to get a quick grasp of the situation at hand. Where experience comes into play is understanding of what tools are best for what tasks. Mathematics is one of the tools that should be found in any person in CS field should have in their "toolbox." As for how far into advanced math would be required -- it all depends on the situation. I'd found having some background knowledge of abstract algebra to be quite helpful in some situations I'd encountered.

One thing that I sometimes found lacking in some folks is ability to recognize and understand the capabilities and limitations of a particular tool. This could result in performing a particular task to take much longer than required. One situation I distinctly recall was in solving a particular problem for a course that involved a bit of math. One of my schoolmates spent nearly a week hashing out a solution, part of which involved several days in hacking out a program in C. I looked at the same problem, spent about 5 minutes of looking over the equations involved to determine the boundaries of the "area of interest", then pulled up the BASIC interpreter to hack out program in about 15 minutes to come up with a solution to the problem. The 5 minutes of math eliminated days of trial-and-error he'd gone through, and usage of built-in capaibilities of the BASIC interpreter meant I didn't waste time "reinventing the wheel" that he did because the compiler library was lacking in ceratin functions.