If it makes you feel any better, I knew nothing about the field of optimization (convex or otherwise) 3 months ago. But after going through an optimization cour

If it makes you feel any better, I knew nothing about the field of optimization (convex or otherwise) 3 months ago. But after going through an optimization course in my CS master's program (MCSO at UT Austin) this semester, I can parse this part of the abstract fine, minus the Levenberg--Marquardt, which I had to look up. That is with not much of a prior mathematics background. You could probably learn enough in a semester of part-time study to grok this paper, as long as you're comfortable with differential calculus.