I think it is quite normal for someone that is not familiar with IT and that is not a programmer or coder himself to not understand all those formulas, equations and symbols that are often used in a technical whitepaper. It will not really help you to read other technical whitepapers in my opinion. To really understand all those equations you basically would need to study IT and programming for a few years or at least a few months. I don't think though, that it is really necessary to have profound coding knowledge in order to be able to get a feeling if a project has potential or not. There are many other things stated in whitepapers that should be understandable for everyone. Like the problem that the team wants to solve, the way they want to solve that problem, the roadmap and the tokenomics for example.