> I loath academic papers. Often I find I spend days or weeks deciphering mathematics in compsci papers only to find the underlying concept is intuitive and plain, but you're forced to learn it bottom up, constructing the authors original genius from the cryptic scrawlings they left in their paper...
I systematically ignore maths in CS papers. If the concept isn't described with code or pseudo-code at least, I will look at who cites the paper, and look for someone who has replicated enough in code. 90%+ of the time I can avoid dealing with the maths entirely, or get enough details that I can glean the rest without bothering trying to actually understand the maths properly.
Usually I find the maths tends to obscure vast amounts of missing details.
Of course, how well that works depends on the specific field.
Some of the papers I have written actually made the problem simpler with math--XML Schema being notoriously impenetrable, for example, and XACML not being much better.
I systematically ignore maths in CS papers. If the concept isn't described with code or pseudo-code at least, I will look at who cites the paper, and look for someone who has replicated enough in code. 90%+ of the time I can avoid dealing with the maths entirely, or get enough details that I can glean the rest without bothering trying to actually understand the maths properly.
Usually I find the maths tends to obscure vast amounts of missing details.
Of course, how well that works depends on the specific field.