Entering math through the side door [duplicate]

The bad news is that mathematical notation can be regarded as an incredibly dense kind of compression: you take a very subtle and carefully evolved idea and choose some symbol to represent it. The "quick meaning" of a symbol will typically lose all the subtlety.

There's a worse problem: typesetting is a pain, so it's pretty common for mathematicians to use the same notation to mean different (although often closely-related) things, depending on context. As an example,

$$ \int_0^1 \frac{1}{x^2} dx $$ and $$ \int_0^1 \frac{1}{1 + x^2} dx $$ denote rather different things. The first is called an "improper integral," and as a mathematician, I notice that because I see that the integrand (that is, $\frac{1}{x^2}$) turns out to head towards infinity as $x$ approaches the lower-limit of the integral (namely $0$), but I see that the second is not improper, because the integrand is nice over the whole interval $0 \le x \le 1$. If you happened to find a book that told you how to do "numerical integration" and tried to apply the ideas to the first integral, you might well get things wrong, and never know why.

In short: the way to learn enough math to program things responsibly is to make sure that the person who asks you to write the program either explains them to you, and how s/he wishes you to convert them to code, or to learn the math yourself.

I'm not trying to be snarky here, but if you said "I was never good at chemistry, but I want to do home electroplating, so can someone tell me what those chemical names all mean?", you'd instantly know that this was crazy (I hope). Perhaps a better instance would be "I want to build high-power electronics, but don't understand circuit diagrams." The main difference in this case is that in mathematics, the meanings are probably more subtle and the ambiguity generally far greater, and resolved only by context.

These are all symbols that are usually learned in high school or introductory math in college. There is a wiki page that gives names and purpose for most symbols: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols

Wikipedia may not be a reliable source for some topics, but with math it is usually very good for a run down in an unknown or new topic.