Most adults give up on maths around the level where the amount of symbols start to grow, or slightly before (to be clear, I&#x27;m not claiming notation is the only cause of this - it certainly isn&#x27;t, but it does mean we really don&#x27;t know whether most people would manage to pick it up; personally I think it is a major factor in making people struggle with maths).<p>For my part, the notation was certainly part of it. It matters. I used to love maths but I started finding it impossible to read even as the concepts were still easy enough to understand. I&#x27;d write things out as programs instead to understand it without being hampered by the notation. I learned symbolic differentiation that way, for example.<p>But I quickly realised that this basically closed maths off to me as a viable subject, and I opted out of all optional maths courses other than boolean logic for my CS studies.<p>I get that for those who find mathematical notation easy to work with, it seems indispensable, but don&#x27;t underestimate the amount of people for whom the notation is the barrier that basically makes mathematics inaccessible.<p>I&#x27;ve picked up quite a bit of maths since, but always by understanding the concepts through code rather than trying to parse mathematical notation.