[merlinran]

Had been in the same situation for years. Read a paper, encounter the first equation, scratch my head and search around trying to understand it, give up. That changed half a month ago, after watching the Linear Algebra and Calculus course at https://www.youtube.com/c/3blue1brown/playlists?view=50&sort....

Let me explain a little bit. Just like a foreign language you stopped learning and using after high school, what prevents you from using it fluently is not just the vocabulary and grammar, but also the intuition and the understanding of the language as a whole. Luckily, math is a human designed language, with linear algebra and calculus being the fundamentals. And again, learning them is about building intuition on why and how they are used, so whenever you encounter transformation, you think in terms of vectors and matrices, and derivative for anything relevant to rate of change. By using carefully designed examples and visual representation, Grant Sanderson greatly smoothed the learning curve in the video courses. Try it out and you'll see.

Beyond that, different fields do have slightly different notation. When you first encounter them, just grab some introduction books or online courses and skim over the very first chapters.