[Myrmornis]

I'm sure you're right that there's poor terminology, and Wikipedia math is certainly daunting. But in general the many mathematical exposition PDFs scattered across the Internet are beautifully written by careful, intelligent people. I'm a software engineer who's spent many hours reading them and also trying to do graduate classes as an adult. It's unfortunately common on Hacker News to encounter people who think that "I'd be good at math if only they used code to explain it" or "I'd be good at math if it used better terminology/notation".

The truth is that math is hard: few other subjects have anything close to its crazy conceptual breadth and depth, with hardish concepts being built upon hardish concepts in many layers.

[bonoboTP]

I've had quite some success during my CS BSc math classes with inventing/using verbose but clearer notation and rewriting things more explicitly, programming things up, playing with Mathematica etc.

For example, Fourier is more clear to me as: F{t -> sin(t)} = omega -> (...) instead of F(sin(t)) = (...). Or D{x -> x^2}(x) = 2x instead of (x^2)' = 2x

Abuse of notation is very common, like using f(x) both as the function and as the return value at some input x etc. For example, the chain rule is often notated in a way that hides a lot. Math uses so many single letter variables, uses huge formulas instead of factoring out parts and using multiple lines, math people don't seem to appreciate namespaces and dislike nested variable scoping etc.

It's not magic that makes everything super easy, but it helps.

[lanstin]

I agree with this - real analysis and functional analysis with have the cognitive complexity of three months worth of the cognitive of software puzzles in each weekly problem set.