I'm pretty good at logic, problem solving, etc..., but do find parsing mathematical notation quite hard. Is there actually a good way to learn it?
What I have most difficulty with is: it's not always clear which symbols/letters are knowns, which are unknowns, and which are values you choose yourself. Not all symbols/letters are always introduced, you sometimes have to guess what they are. Sometimes axes of graphs are not labeled. Sometimes explanation or examples for border cases are missing. And sometimes when in slides or so, the parsing of the mathematical formulas takes too much time compared to the speed, or, the memory of what was on previous slides fades away so the formula on a later slide using something from a previous one can no longer be parsed.
Also when you need to program the [whatever is explained mathematically in a paper], then you have to tell the computer exactly how it works, for every edge case, while in math notation people can and will be inexact.
Maybe there should be a compiler for math notation that gives an error if it's incomplete. :)
You probably want to look at a couple of good undergrad textbooks (calculus, linear algebra, probability). The good textbooks explain the notation and have an index for all the symbols.
Unfortunately, in most cases, you have to know a little bit about the field in order to be able to parse the notation. The upside is that having some background is pretty much a necessity to not screwing up when you try to implement some algorithm.
What I have most difficulty with is: it's not always clear which symbols/letters are knowns, which are unknowns, and which are values you choose yourself. Not all symbols/letters are always introduced, you sometimes have to guess what they are. Sometimes axes of graphs are not labeled. Sometimes explanation or examples for border cases are missing. And sometimes when in slides or so, the parsing of the mathematical formulas takes too much time compared to the speed, or, the memory of what was on previous slides fades away so the formula on a later slide using something from a previous one can no longer be parsed.
Also when you need to program the [whatever is explained mathematically in a paper], then you have to tell the computer exactly how it works, for every edge case, while in math notation people can and will be inexact.
Maybe there should be a compiler for math notation that gives an error if it's incomplete. :)