So, i'm pretty much a dilettante, so take this with some salt. I have a pretty good handle on baby level ML stuff like PCA, k-means, decision tree forests. pret

So, i'm pretty much a dilettante, so take this with some salt. I have a pretty good handle on baby level ML stuff like PCA, k-means, decision tree forests. pretty much the stuff in Mackay and Russel&Norvig. It really depends on what you mean by 'mobile developer'. If you're the kind of guy that can open up the RFC for SNMP and turn that spec into code, you're probably in decent shape. You can take abstract, but very specific, description and turn it into reliable code. Even better would be to take an image processing paper and turn that into code. Maybe something like seam carving to delete stuff from photos. This is better than an RFC, because papers skip steps that are 'obvious' to readers. Video stabilization, AR, there are a bunch of applications that have more intense math. At the end of the day, it's just "finding the minimum" of some function. (like programming is just zeros and ones, easy right?) Each paper is some trick to descend a gradient in a new way, or hop over a local minima or avoid overfitting. You don't really need to understand a whole lot. You can patternmatch math syntax and retype that as code. if you make an error, debugging will suck in that case. But really, you can do a lot of damage without knowing a whole lot. Some linear algebra, some diff eq. You don't have to be super fast at it, there's nothing wrong with taking a couple of days where a math grad student knows off the top of their head. The goal is simply faithful translation. So if a developer just sticking buttons on a panel, that mobile developer probably wouldn't make it. But there are a bunch of mobile developers that could make the switch.