Personally, reading through a bunch of math doesn't help me understand how an algorithm is working. I've always found it far easier to scan through some psuedo

Personally, reading through a bunch of math doesn't help me understand how an algorithm is working. I've always found it far easier to scan through some psuedo-code and read a few paragraphs explaining it. At this point, I can usually look at the loops, recursive calls, and "structure", and get a pretty good idea of how it's working, what it's big-O run time would be, and why. Full blown formal proofs and theorems just don't help my understanding. I agree the math is important for research and writing papers, and proving one algorithm is better than another, but for practical purposes (i.e. actually implementing an algorithm in real code) it's just not very helpful. And the reality is that most people learning about algorithms are going to spend a lot more time implementing algorithms than they will writing papers and doing algorithm research, so I'm not sure a math heavy book like CLRS is really the best undergraduate text.