This might be well known, but is there are good resource for knowing what the various mathematical symbols mean? I only got as far as first year uni maths and I find that when I look at maths papers that are interesting for a problem I want to solve I can't make much progress on working out what all the symbols mean.
Almost all the time once I see the code that implements the mathematics then it is easy to understand, but making sense of all the different symbols is very hard especially when different fields seem to use the same symbols to meant totally different things.
> especially when different fields seem to use the same symbols to meant totally different things
That is the problem: there are by far too few letters and symbols to describe all the objects used in modern mathematics. You need to reuse symbols, and therefore any paper must declare the symbols they use. Sometimes they are even forced to use the same symbol for different things, so you need to have some experience in the field to understand which is the correct reading each time.
The symbol declaration can be done explicitly (by stating the fact, usually at the beginning or in a dedicated section; some books also have a table of notations with references to definitions) or implicitly, when the paper is targeted to scholars that are most probably already familiar with that notation. The latter is probably not very friendly to newcomers, but in most cases if you do not know what implicitly defined objects are, then you probably cannot understand the paper anyway.
In short, there are very few "short ways" into mathematics. If you want to understand things, you have to spend time and study them.
It is a huge job to bring my mathematics up to the required level :)
About the only way I have been able to short-circut the process is outsource to someone who can turn the paper into code - once they do this the maths becomes easy for me to understand.
As others have mentioned, the Wikipedia article [0] provides a good listing of common symbols. If you are trying to read something that uses symbols not in that list (or in a way different from that list), you best bet would be to find a textbook on the subject. Most math books have a glossary of symbols at the beginning or end.
Also, as long as we are on the topic of bad math notation, I would caution that some sources use the symbols in subtly different ways, so you should be sure to check the paper itself for specific conventions.
Almost all the time once I see the code that implements the mathematics then it is easy to understand, but making sense of all the different symbols is very hard especially when different fields seem to use the same symbols to meant totally different things.