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Mathematical Notation Is Awful

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Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#21

Post by stdbrouw »

bjornsing wrote: post #17

One interesting observation that popped into my mind when I read the OP: Mathematicians don't write mathematical notation in papers/books by hand anymore, they use a far more verbose language called LATEX. Wouldn't it be great if every time you saw a mathematical formula there was a little widget to push that would show you the "source code" in LATEX++, and LATEX++ was like LATEX but made up of stringently defined ma…

Yeah, it's a bummer that LaTeX math notation is really just markup and has no indication of what belongs together and what the purpose of various symbols is.

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#22

Post by Smaug123 »

mrottenkolber wrote: post #18

This a thousand times. I boycott math notation. My most memorable math moments are: - giving a talk on notation in high school (I was not tasked to do this, I decided to do it on my own) because I was FREAKED OUT by how we were using tons of symbols nobody had ever explained or defined - converting all Math I encountered in University to Common Lisp programs to get rid of the shit notation - bursting into crazy laugh…

Out of interest, what subject did you study at University? I studied maths, and everything was defined rigorously at the start of every pure course; and you could always stop the lecturer and ask them what a given piece of notation meant.

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#24

Post by bjornsing »

chilie wrote: post #13

These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field. First, the expectation thing. He's using a special case, E(X), and complaining that the more general case doesn't follow the general case. It's like saying "Well the plural of mouse is mice but the plural of house isn't hice!". The general definition of expectation (for a discrete probability…

> These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field.

True, but it raises a "barrier to entry" (on purpose, or by mistake) because it is almost impossible to enter the field without a supervisor/colleges that provide the "semi-supervision" needed to learn the notation.

I can understand how those in the field think that's a good thing, but for the rest of humanity it probably isn't... Look e.g. what has happened in academic operating system research: innovation has moved from Berkeley and Bell Labs to the Linux kernel mailing list. Are academic OS researchers better off because of it? Probably not. Is the world better off? You bet!

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#25

Post by catnaroek »

mrottenkolber wrote: post #18

This a thousand times. I boycott math notation. My most memorable math moments are: - giving a talk on notation in high school (I was not tasked to do this, I decided to do it on my own) because I was FREAKED OUT by how we were using tons of symbols nobody had ever explained or defined - converting all Math I encountered in University to Common Lisp programs to get rid of the shit notation - bursting into crazy laugh…

Mathematical notation was designed to calculate by hand. If you actually tried to calculate anything by hand, you'd dread long variable names and not being able to use infix symbols with sensible precedence rules. But, of course, a programmer would rather die than calculate anything by hand.

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#27

Post by catnaroek »

bjornsing wrote: post #17

One interesting observation that popped into my mind when I read the OP: Mathematicians don't write mathematical notation in papers/books by hand anymore, they use a far more verbose language called LATEX. Wouldn't it be great if every time you saw a mathematical formula there was a little widget to push that would show you the "source code" in LATEX++, and LATEX++ was like LATEX but made up of stringently defined ma…

LaTeX... now that is unreadable. Traditional mathematical notation is just fine.

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#28

Post by bjornsing »

Smaug123 wrote: post #20
bjornsing wrote: post #17

One interesting observation that popped into my mind when I read the OP: Mathematicians don't write mathematical notation in papers/books by hand anymore, they use a far more verbose language called LATEX. Wouldn't it be great if every time you saw a mathematical formula there was a little widget to push that would show you the "source code" in LATEX++, and LATEX++ was like LATEX but made up of stringently defined ma…

It's good practice anyway in LaTeX to define your own aliases and use them for semantic information. Like in one of my recent projects, I define: \newcommand{\disjointunion}{\sqcup}

Now we're getting close to the heart of the matter: In LaTeX it's "good practice" to define the semantics of operators, in programming languages it's an absolute requirement.

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#29

Post by bjornsing »

catnaroek wrote: post #27
bjornsing wrote: post #17

One interesting observation that popped into my mind when I read the OP: Mathematicians don't write mathematical notation in papers/books by hand anymore, they use a far more verbose language called LATEX. Wouldn't it be great if every time you saw a mathematical formula there was a little widget to push that would show you the "source code" in LATEX++, and LATEX++ was like LATEX but made up of stringently defined ma…

LaTeX... now that is unreadable. Traditional mathematical notation is just fine.

Have you seen x86 machine code? ;P

Re: Mathematical Notation Is Awful

#30

Post by julian37 »

chilie wrote: post #13

These are just issues that someone unfamiliar with a field would face. None of them are problems for those of us in the field. First, the expectation thing. He's using a special case, E(X), and complaining that the more general case doesn't follow the general case. It's like saying "Well the plural of mouse is mice but the plural of house isn't hice!". The general definition of expectation (for a discrete probability…

> It's like saying "Well the plural of mouse is mice but the plural of house isn't hice!"

Yes, that's exactly what he is saying:

> Math is a language that is about as consistent as English, and that's on a good day.

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