The paper that keeps showing up

With the rise of neural nets, there is some solid circumstantial evidence that human intelligence is a re-purposing of parts of the brain evolved for vision processing (dunno what the biologists have figured out but hopefully they agree). Most of the people who I've listened to talk about how there is usually a sharp change-over moment when they go from being unable to do understand something to grasping it.

Get used to maths being impossible to understand for a long period of time, then suddenly easy to understand after that. IQ is relevant if you have to try and figure it out from first principles, but after that it probably only governs speed of learning rather than what can be done. This math in particular is not hard in the grand scheme, it is basically multiplication but a bit spiced up with multiple perspectives. And outrageously easy to implement wrong.

Although if you try to approach math expecting to be able to 'see' the answer with concepts you already understand it'll be painful. Real Math (TM, taught by Real Scotsmen) is learning to see things that you couldn't see before. The expectation is to encounter concepts that initially you can only access by symbol manipulation and in time, with training, become intuitive suddenly after a long period of practice.

Maybe you have astonishing skills in other domains but are not suited to mathematical thinking for whatever reasons. Also, the current mathematical language is just a compromise that suits a majority, maybe you are not in it.

I find the formulas on the page quite easy to read and to "sense" (I also have a background in cryptography, which helps a lot). I like these expressions, because they are very simple to manipulate, which helps understanding them better, and also to infer more results. However, because I "sense" them, I can always dig down every symbols and know what's behind (eg. the scalar multiplication, k.G, I know it is actually like doing the sum of G+G k times, which in turns results in more operations in the particular field or group that G belongs to, etc).

If you study electricity where complex numbers are used a lot for instance, the i symbol becomes very tangible. It is more than a symbol, but a real object with well defined properties, and that you can describe in multiple ways. If you start to learn all these properties and multiple ways, you will understand it better, until it becomes very familiar. Also, you have to understand that i is just not a fancy object, it is actually an object mathematicians created because some operations didn't have results in the set of real (in particular not all polynomial equations had roots). So we extended the set of real with a bigger set (the set of complex, which is actually a two-dimensional set), where these problem disappeared. Later, mathematicians and physicists start to use complex numbers a lot because they could describe many useful properties in a very compact way.

Probably if I was exposed to real world applications of that math it would be easier to reason about it. I found that to be the biggest problem with my academic curriculum - there was a lot of abstract math concepts that they teach you in first 2 years, and you discover their actual usefulness only years later.