I'm a biochemist wrapping up my PhD on peptide-protein interaction prediction (finishing in March), and I've developed a newfound interest in math that I never really had in my earlier life. I'm curious about how to pursue it as someone without much formal background.

In early university, I took intro calculus, statistics, and general functions (including trigonometry), but I haven't had any formal math education past second year in undergrad. I also have a more extensive knowledge of vectors and matrices because they relate to my main subject area, although I'm self-taught in that area for the most part. I work with machine learning, and more specifically, non-neural models that rely on conditional scoring matrices for biological sequences.

I've played with neural networks as well, but beyond very basic activation functions and general usage, I don't really know much of the mathematical theories behind them. I've also become interested, more generally, in mathematical complexity in nonlinear systems, after watching some layman-accessible talks by biophysicists and mathematicians on these areas.

I'm pursuing a career in bioinformatics and computational biology, with a specific interest in protein structure and interaction modelling, and I think I need a more thorough basis in higher math to be able to take that up a notch. Can you guys point me towards what I should be studying and where I ought to begin with this?