[paulpauper]

One problem is understanding the notation, as sometimes steps are omitted. I remember one time spending 10 minutes trying to figure out what an author meant, only to learn later he was using something called a 'total derivative'. this means that variables like x,y are actually functions of time . Having a professional simply explain it instead of having to infer the meaning from the author would save a lot of time

[kpil]

As someone that learned some math in university about 20 years ago, and probably have forgotten most of it, I have a hard time when reading something mathematical that interrests me today.

Maybe the authors of the papers that I read aren't always that pedagogical, and I get totally lost when someone tosses in a variable only to half-heartedly define what it is a page later.

I think it's mostly due to that I suck at math, and need to figure out obvious things on my own - but perhaps also due to my programmer-view of the world were you typically define things before you use them...

But learning on your own is probably hard. I got irritated once when I needed some not totally trivial transformations for a GIS application. I spent some evenings repeating from my old books, but it was unfathomably boring, so I gave up as soon as I got my transformation working :-) c