[gravypod]

Yes exactly. It seems that no matter what you know math majors don't care. You need to walk the walk and talk the talk.

If you read through my comment history you will find me arguing with many mathematicians who think that math is just inherently harder and I must not understand it because I'm not smart enough. I think that the concepts and basic building blocks seem simple when explained outside the context of the current notation used.

You can see a perfectly prime example of this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12991581

Read through my comments to see how I feel.

I'd also like to be clear. I'm not saying math is easy, I'm just saying that it can't be impossible for my peasant brain to not be smart enough to understand the concepts of what's going on. I mean it's not Greek.... well... it currently is but it doesn't need to be!

[jacobolus]

The concepts are not individually hard, but they build on each-other (sometimes unnecessarily, but sometimes very helpfully). If you care about understanding the tools you should take the few years of study it takes to learn the notation to a level of fluency, or you won’t be able to read the vast literature written in that notation.

It’s like if you’re interested in 19th century piano music, but all your experience with reading music is in the form of guitar tablature, then you’re going to have a tough time with your study. You could conceivably find top-down videos of someone playing some of the music you care about, or convince someone to translate some parts of it into guitar tablature. But it would be a better use of your time to just learn to read standard music notation.