I never understood people who preferred traditional math notation (e.g. single letter symbols, weird characters like ∣q⟩ instead of writing down an explicit type, etc.). I guess the main advantage is terseness? To me, the mathematical expressions would be so much easier to understand if they were just written in pseudo code or an actual programming language like Python.

▲

xscott 34 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I used to work in a field where both "time" and "delay" (both in seconds) were needed. So the math people would use tau or delta on the white board. Ok, fine - it's concise.

When that later got translated to source code, they'd use "delta" or "tau" instead of "delay". It made me want to scream.

My first degree was in math, and I hate most math notation.

▲

OkayPhysicist an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Terseness is a significant advantage in pattern recognition. If you write a long, detailed breakdown of every step, not only are you spending a bunch of time writing, you're also obscuring the natural symmetries of the statement.

It's like saying "I never understood people who prefer to use functions instead of inlining everything". Adding a bunch of visual noise to a statement doesn't improve comprehension.

▲

crubier an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

This 1,000%

Trying to read any math paper is basically like trying to read CodeGolf.

▲

aeternum 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Math notation ultimately is pseudo code just with mostly single letter variables and many operators that are encoded purely by position thus not even requiring a symbol.

Remember that the oft-used e^x is actually an infinite series, even writing it out in summation form would be quite verbose given its frequency in many equations.

▲

crubier an hour ago | parent | next [-]

exp(x)

▲

kurthr an hour ago | parent [-]

Longer to write and generally a numerical rather than symbolic representation.

	▲	crubier 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Longer to write: Don't care, that's kinda the point. I'd rather read a descriptive name in english than a greek letter with a tilda and a dot subscript. Generally a numerical rather than symbolic representation: Meh https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/functions/elementary.h...

▲

SkyBelow an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I feel the magic in math is that the notation is to a more universal sort of language, and the e^x captures that. e^x means that infinite series, but it means a few other things at the same time. That those different things are sometimes related, that e^2 means e*e, a simple enough operation most can understand, but that it also means that infinite series with 2 in place of x, is part of the complexity of math that makes it quite different than a classical programming language. With most programming languages, someone assigned those equivalent meaning, and while it might be important to understand why, it shows you the mind of the who designed the language. But, in math (and in true Computer Science), when you see an equivalence of this sort, whose mind are you now glimpsing into?

But, for someone just starting out (or even an expert who just wandered into a new area), this becomes a barrier to understanding. Sometimes we need the mathematical summary, what tells us the immediately answer we are interested in, perhaps even if it loses the deeper nuances that are beneficial for the experts more fluent in the language.

(And yes, all math notation is human created, so it makes my point quite a bit messier in practice.)

▲

glaslong an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You really just get tired of writing/reading "AbstractJavaSerializerBeanFactoryFactoryAbstactMutatorFactoryAccessEnterpriseBeanFactory()" over and over again.

So you and all your peers agree to call that procedure "ẽ"

▲

htrp 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

math notation doesn't bias towards English language understanding like pseudocode

▲

dfee an hour ago | parent [-]

but it biases towards the latin alphabet. so your point is diminished.

▲

tyre an hour ago | parent [-]

and Greek!

	▲	xscott 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		And one Hebrew letter. Just one though.

▲

dboreham an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, humanity struggled for 2000 years trying to do mathematics without notation, so its benefit is not to be sniffed at. But really it's just an APL-vs-Fortran type debate. They're not fundamentally different. Remember also that Ramanujan had to re-use paper it was so costly/hard to find.