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Just yesterday I decided to begin reading a Calculus book (I never went to college). The very first thing covered was ƒ(x) which describes input being passed into a function. Needless to say, as a programmer I am very familiar with this concept.

So far, my vote is for Calculus.

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In my high school, I remember being introduced to functions of that type in Algebra II and at the very latest trigonometry (sines and cosines).

While a knowledge of functions is vital to understanding Calculus (the fundamental theorem of calculus depends on them), it's only a small component of the bigger picture. Calculus is mainly about how functions change with respect to some other variable (time is common) and the inverse of that operation.

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