Most people are exposed to math and to cookbook recipes for cooking food, both areas having strong relationships with programming.

What is harder to grasp is that programming is an intersection of math with cooking. And cookbook recipes are copyrightable, while math is not.

And so the burden lies on the lawyer to describe the relationship between an algorithm and the math behind it. That isn't necessarily hard, but requires creativity and time, plus you have to take into account the short attention span of most people, so you've got to pick your battles. And I guess Google's lawyer did a bad job here.