As someone that learned some math in university about 20 years ago, and probably have forgotten most of it, I have a hard time when reading something mathematic

As someone that learned some math in university about 20 years ago, and probably have forgotten most of it, I have a hard time when reading something mathematical that interrests me today. Maybe the authors of the papers that I read aren't always that pedagogical, and I get totally lost when someone tosses in a variable only to half-heartedly define what it is a page later. I think it's mostly due to that I suck at math, and need to figure out obvious things on my own - but perhaps also due to my programmer-view of the world were you typically define things before you use them... But learning on your own is probably hard. I got irritated once when I needed some not totally trivial transformations for a GIS application. I spent some evenings repeating from my old books, but it was unfathomably boring, so I gave up as soon as I got my transformation working :-) c