Came across a thread on Twitter the other day where people shared ways of reading and understanding unfamiliar math.

It is a common sentiment that Wikipedia is useless because it’s too technical, and lecture notes are much better and easier to understand. I was surprised that you can find them at all, on Google you can search like this:

filetype:pdf site:edu MATH_TOPIC

Some people found YouTube surprisingly helpful because of a large amount of videos explaining different mathematical concepts in a way you can follow.

Another user shared two articles they found helpful:

1. “Reading Mathematics” by John Hamal Hubbard
2. “The Language and Grammar of Mathematics” by Timothy Gowers

For us developers, reading math is often done with the goal of implementing, so another approach is to translate the math to separate variables with extremely verbose names and implement the described expressions with them. This way you’re essentially disassembling the expressions and it’s easier to see what you’re struggling with and find how it works.

Overall: study math to be able to read it easier, and be ready to go very slowly and take several passes. It’s hard, and it’s normal and expected.