good math books
jimbokun: I just happened to find this book browsing through my campus library a few days ago:Basic Training in MathematicsA Fitness Program for Science StudentsShankar, R.http://www.springer.com/physics/book/978-0-306-45036-5Meant as a review/primer for undergraduates in the physical sciences and engineering.  Mainly covers topics in calculus and linear algebra.  Does a fairly good job of covering the connections between ideas and some of the intuition behind ideas, while keeping things pretty concise.  That is my review after finishing the first chapter, which is as far as I've got.The "Basic Training" perspective peeks through in comments like:"Trigonometric functions, identities and derivatives, radian measures for angles.  These will not be listed here since you must have already learned them by heart as a child."So don't expect to be overly molly-coddled by this book.I'm reading it for many of the same reasons you describe.  Taking a machine learning course in the Fall, want to brush up on the underlying mathematics involved.  Statistics, calculus and linear algebra are pervasive in most of the ML books I have looked at.  I note that you did not list linear algebra, but that is the area where I have been spending the most time, mainly because I never took a course in it, where the other topics I have at least some background I can review.