This thread is making me feel much better. I've watched the first three lectures and am doing okay with the readings, but I'm still stuck on the first problem set and was in fact seriously thinking of giving up (cue the I'm-not-smart-enough self-loathing channel!). But I would like to continue to plug away at it. My mother informs me that logarithm is just a fancy word for exponent, so I may even be able to handle the mathy stuff, but all the kinds of help people have suggested and offered sound great.