[imtringued]

The thing about math is that developers live in a well specified world. The moment they have to deal with mathematical notation, not only is there no way to look it up, it is inherently ambiguous and arbitrary and nobody tells you that. No math teacher on this planet is going to tell you "alpha beta gamma usually refers to angles, by the the way this is completely made up. In fact, it is the result of a popularity contest. If you see anyone else use the same symbols it is sheer coincidence as all mathematic notation is made up on the spot. The moment you read another book, they are free to do things as they see fit."

But here is the thing. As a software developer, there IS a "higher being" aka a designer for the programming language or library and they try and try and try their best to maintain "rhyme and reason". With math? There is no such thing, or rather, everyone pisses in the pool of math notation but nobody wants to admit that and so you get confused people, people who mistakenly look for the "rhyme and reason" and they find none, they find no pattern.

So the first lesson about math notation that you need to learn is that there is no such thing. There is this chicken scratch that makes it easier to write on the blackboard or on paper and that is about it.

Math isn't "hard..." it is abstract.