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I’m curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.
This has been great for helping me figure out what to even call various symbols so I can then go look up what they actually intend you to do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For each symbol, I try to make an analogy. Analogies are utterly unhelpful without a thorough understanding of the actual definitions.
Analogies on their own are limited if you don't continue to the technical definition. They are a raft to cross the river.
or rather like net to catch the fish. once you have the fish, you can forget about the net.
this is not far removed from words, which are used to convey meaning. once you have meaning you can forget about the words ;)
edit-001 : fmt changes.
I’m curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.
It's difficult to google mathematical stuff, especially since each symbol has many different meanings depending on which branch of mathematics you're dealing with - this book solves that problem nicely by letting you look up by the roman letter a symbol is similar to, by mathematical discipline, etc.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For each symbol, I try to make an analogy. Analogies are utterly unhelpful without a thorough understanding of the actual definitions.
Analogies on their own are limited if you don't continue to the technical definition. They are a raft to cross the river.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What if everyone learns differently?
haha true, I envy people that just sit down read a book/chapter/article/blog linearly and then comes enlightened, I can't, I need to first Skim almost 90% of the material, and then start again from the bottom, reading the last part and trying to figure out how the first part is connected or are important for understand what is written. I think that people that read it linearly don't miss important info, but I just ca…
I’m curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.
I highly recommend the book "Mathematical Notation: A Guide for Engineers and Scientists" by Edward Scheinerman (Amazon link: http://a.co/c1jcvLH ). It's short, and perfect for looking up symbols, brackets, subscript/superscript conventions etc. for science and engineering math (for me, the stuff I encounter in my programming life, when I read papers & books that deal with graphics programming, DSP, cryptography, etc…
I’m curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.
Probably the first thing to do is find a copy of Lawrence Chang's Handbook of Spoken Mathematics (also referenced in a previous HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10284052 ) This has been great for helping me figure out what to even call various symbols so I can then go look up what they actually intend you to do.
Anyway, I still read some symbols differently.
”I can’t understand anything in general unless I’m carrying along in my mind a specific example and watching it go. Some people think in the beginning that I’m kind of slow and I don’t understand the problem, because I ask a lot of these “dumb” questions: “Is a cathode plus or minus? Is an an-ion this way, or that way?” But later, when the guy’s in the middle of a bunch of equations, he’ll say something and I’ll say, “Wait a minute! There’s an error! That can’t be right!” The guy looks at his equations, and sure enough, after a while, he finds the mistake and wonders, “How the hell did this guy, who hardly understood at the beginning, find that mistake in the mess of all these equations?” He thinks I’m following the steps mathematically, but that’s not what I’m doing. I have the specific, physical example of what he’s trying to analyze, and I know from instinct and experience the properties of the thing. So when the equation says it should behave so-and-so, and I know that’s the wrong way around, I jump up and say, “Wait! There’s a mistake!”
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also a very good advice I had received a long time ago but that I had dismissed until recently: some articles are just badly written. The author sometimes forget to mention what B actually is, changes the meaning of the multiplication operator implicitly, assumes the formula given is inside an integral.... I could go on. A maths article is an article. A lot are imperfect, quite a few are bad. Some times it is not the…
I remember reading this exact piece of advice, but have been trying to remember where. Would anybody be able to provide the blog post I believe we both read, which says almost exactly what Iv wrote? I could have sworn Michael Nielson wrote it, but I was unable to produce it last time I searched. So I am following OP's advice and am asking here. :P
I’m curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.
Shameless plug, I write about math on BetterExplained.com For each symbol, I try to make an analogy. For "e", for example, I have the notion of "continuous growth". The formal definition is this: https://betterexplained.com/ColorizedMath/content/img/E_(mat... "The base for continuous growth is the unit quantity earning unit interest for unit time." Once you see the role of each part of the definition, the idea snaps…