I am by no means a mathematician or exceptional at much other than counting in binary but codeacademy has helped a bunch. I have been able to play around with Javascript, Ruby, Python designing apps and build your own adventure platforms with my friends. Its free and educational! :)
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Don't discount those accomplishments. For some fields I believe if a person has the desire and self-motivation the information is out there and they can easily learn the same things they would learn at a university. The problem is to do it truly well you need a lot of passion and self motivation since you don't have someone you are paying you telling you that you must turn something in. On the flip side those people that did it on their own are often FAR MORE skilled at it as they had to be truly passionate about the topic to make it that far. Some of the best programmers and IT people I've worked with were that way DESPITE the college or lack of college education. There are some fields that do require a university as we can't really do some things without access to really expensive and specialized equipment, and resources. I believe you can be a brilliant programmer, mathematician or both without going to a University if you have the drive and will to do so. I don't consider myself particularly skilled at math. I am great at the math I have a purpose for, and other parts of math I didn't put to use so they have atrophied to almost non-existence. It is also the fact that I may not have ever learned some maths that would truly have helped me. So I am ignorant. I am a decent and eccentric programmer though, so I managed to code fractals despite some of the crazy math involved. I could look at the code and understand what it was doing better than I could look at the math. I'd like to rectify that but I kind of doubt I will at this stage. Though ya never know... stranger things have happened.
Does @hmfoucault have anything to do with Foucault's Pendulum?
EDIT: you may have to reply to your own post, or to mine... though the only way I'll know you replied to your own is if you put @dwinblood somewhere in it to let me know. I like to talk so I run into this nesting limit at least once a day. :)