Did you do it in a few seconds while reading from a slide and listening to a lecturer talk about math? I did the same thing as you and it took me more than 10 seconds to parse through the notation. If someone put this up on a slide during a talk and asked if I 'understood it', the answer would be no. Doesn't mean I'm incapable of understanding it, just that it uses muscles I don't flex very often.

Well, as I was trying to allude to, yeah, I did understand it pretty quickly because it uses a lot of common patterns.

Possibly I'm an extreme outlier, because when I say that I try to keep up with the field a bit, I really do. I really do watch YouTube videos of presentations full of math significantly more complicated than that every so often.

But still, I would also stand by my wondering if there was something else going on here, because it still seems to be grad students in school at the time really should have followed that. When I was in grad school I am quite confident I knew several other students who would have understood that just fine, and I went to "just" Michigan State, not MIT or Berkeley.

'Outside their field' was poor wording on my part. I meant more that it's not the sort of thing that most CS engineers see day to day. People forget things they don't use often.

> CS

> engineers

I think it's important to realize that these are two different things. One is a formal research science, the other deals with practical problem-solving and implementations.

Your typical software engineer likely has a CS degree, but CS researchers and software engineers are two separate populations. Sometimes the same person will do both, but usually not at the same time in their life or for the same organization.

edit: for example, you don't even need a computer to learn computer science fundamentals. A notebook or deck of playing cards will do fine.

As I write this, thearn4's post is fading into the grey, but it's true. That's why I qualified my post with trained as a computer scientist. I have a Master's degree in the field, and I try to keep up with it to some extent, but what I am now is an engineer. Degree or no, I can not currently say "I am a Computer Scientist" with a straight face.

He wasn't talking to software engineers who may have been out of school for a while had time to forget this stuff though; looks like he was talking to a mix of graduate and undergraduate students and some faculty, and I would think stuff like this would be covered during freshman/junior year for sure?

TBH I personally don't always raise hands to such questions though.