Recent report from my mother, who's a physicist with a strong math background, no statistics: Take the coursera intro course. She said that the first hour or t

Recent report from my mother, who's a physicist with a strong math background, no statistics: Take the coursera intro course. She said that the first hour or two were a little frustrating for the kinds of reasons you mention. After that, she could skip the "long" explanations & examples by going to the math directly. You'll progress 5X faster than normal after that. She "got it" by creating ML "proofs" for math problems without doing math. She didn't like all the image recognition examples. Said it's a confusing place to start. You are probably stuck with learning from a source that assumes you don't know math, because most people (including me) don't. This course is probably not for you if you want theory, as it's focused on "using" ML algorithms, not writing them. That said, this might be useful to you if you already have stuff that you want to do, and need a way of doing the "sticks and duct tape."