[elamje]

Just go for it. Learning the math just helps you understand it’s not magic, like learning to program helps you understand computers aren’t magic.

As someone that learned a good bit of the math and implemented NN code with backprop from scratch, I agree with the parent. To learn the math and get better results than cutting edge ML researchers would be as likely as winning the lottery.

As an exercise, the math is fun to learn and not terribly complicated for backprop type of stuff.