I disagree. There is nothing magic or hard about basic ML. You can do real work with only some basic linear algebra and programming skills. Sure you won't be doing novel deep learning on 100 terabyte datasets, but most problems aren't that anyway.
Yeah, and to be honest while it's always important to be able to understand the math behind what you're doing, you can easily get started with just understanding what these algorithms do and why, and then work to expand your knowledge of the math over time from there.
