I think mathematical formalism is necessary to communicate precisely what you're doing, however, I do wish academic papers supplemented the math with just some

I think mathematical formalism is necessary to communicate precisely what you're doing, however, I do wish academic papers supplemented the math with just some intuitive plain English describing what's going on. Sometimes you just want to get the gist of what the authors are doing without having to solve math problems in your head. Other times you really are interested in actually re-producing what they did and so you really need the math/code.