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Is there a formal understanding, or terminology, regarding the different senses of the adjective in the following?

Poor mathematician . . . Highly regarded in his field, he’s sans souci about being ‘short of the readies’ (sans sou, see?).

Poor mathematician . . . Although he's certainly ‘of means’, frankly, he wouldn’t know a mean from a median if they met him halfway.

Polysemy?

"Poor" here is a polyseme: it has two senses which are different, but related. They both mean 'unsatisfactory', in terms of money and competence respectively.

Thanks. I’m always interested in words about words and figures of speech.
What I was trying to point out is that in the first instance, the noun describes an individual and the adjective, separately, applies to that good soul. In the latter, the adjective applies to the descriptive noun.

You may be interested in the Wikipedia article on intersective and non-intersective modifiers. I think it is relevant to your point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersective_modifier

If I understand the article correctly, "poor" is intersective in your first example (he is poor and a mathematician) but non-intersective in your second example (he is poor only insofar as he is a mathematician).

Thanks so much. Since running across ‘litotes’ in Time magazine years ago, I’ve been fascinated by words categorizing words and figures of speech. Most, I think, are based on Greek. But some, or many, might not have antecedents in Classical Greece, but rather be the inventions of British scholars.