“Mathematical Notation: A Guide for Engineers and Scientists”[0] really changed my abilities with being able to read papers and decipher what was going on. I had university math experience but it was a long time ago. When I started reading papers for algorithms later in my career I couldn’t get past the notation. Once the symbols are explained, as a programmer, I was able to grok so much more. This should be on every…
As a programmer I really wish math notation was more rigorous: less ambiguity, more explicit typing, no implicit variables, etc. So much of it would never pass code review. We programmers figured out that code should be optimized for readability, not writtability ; I wish mathematicians did too.
Totally agree! I remember raising my eyebrow at ambiguities in math notation as early as high school, before I could articulate them as such. One specific example is the convention of cos^-1(x) referring to the inverse cosine of x, instead of the multiplicative inverse of cos(x). Similarly, the convention of cos^2(x) referring to the square of cos(x) instead of a nested cos(cos(x)). It's madness, and totally avoidable.