Math notations are so badly designed (if there exists any design) If you'd spoken in plain English, Lamport, most people in the room could have understood the concept of your tedious formula.
So it's not because we don't understand math - it's because the math notations are usually over abbreviated, obscure and inconsistent. Math itself is strict but there's no strict common language to express it, which eventually prevents people from understanding it.
There is a strict common language to express it. The speaker used that language (except for the nonstandard replacement of brackets with square brackets, which was apparently clearly pointed out at the start). The problems start when you speak in plain English: then you get things like everyone using different definitions of continuity and thinking everyone else is just spouting nonsense until someone comes up with epsilon-deltas.
