[cs702]

True. I cannot disagree with any of this.

That said, the math we're talking about (that is, the math necessary for understanding, say, the sequence of transformations that make up a convnet) lies far below the ceiling of complexity you mention.

I'm not sure symbol reuse and overloading are as much of an issue. I've run into people who are quite proficient with Perl and routinely use complicated regular expressions who say they didn't like math growing up.