Terry Tao on some desirable properties of mathematical notation

Post by Smaug123 » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

ChrisLomont wrote: post #219

Smaug123 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, do you really want me to wade through sixteen pages to discover the notation first (written by someone who doesn't know about \langle and \rangle, either)? I would consider it bad argumentative form of the same water as Euler's apocryphal "does God exist" debate with Diderot. At the very least, you will struggle to persuade me that the use of \wedge is easier to understand than the English word "and" with line…

>do you really want me to wade .... No - just pointing out that no matter how hard you studied that an English equivalent of such a terse expression will be a mess, vastly harder to understand. >At the very least, you will struggle to persuade me that the use of \wedge is easier to understand than the English word "and" with line breaks. You're making my case for me :) The word "and" and "or" are ambiguous in common…

Post by dang » Thu, Jul 23, 2020, 7:37 PM UTC

foobar_ wrote: post #222

gspr wrote: post #220

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> Yes. Completely ignore the degenerates. There are many sober people who have made art and science. You should not allow mentally ill lunatics to define art, music, religion, maths or politics anymore than you will allow them to be your cab driver or spouse. What a vile attitude. > Clearly science is about sobriety and not schizophrenia. Of course. No endeavour is about schizophrenia. That doesn't mean the contribut…

Clearly you are too much of a pedant to do anything useful in life, so why don't you build a time machine and interrupt your birthing process ? It should be easy ... you can build it using calculus. Science is about modelling the real world. Mathematics is about modelling. Programming is "interactive" modelling. Its all about modelling accurately. Clearly you are also too much of a bigot to understand that models are…

Post by MaxBarraclough » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 12:25 PM UTC

omaranto wrote: post #183

rytill wrote: post #79

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Not true at all, there are several times I've attempted to read through a textbook only to be stopped by notation because something was introduced prior to being referenced, or notation is overloaded with multiple meanings. I consistently have run into "perceived or real" confusing mathematical notation as an impediment to learning in a way that programming languages have never, ever caused me. Does no one else feel…

You are making the huge mistake of assuming that if you hadn't given up when facing difficulty with the notation, the rest would have been easy, that you would have no trouble understanding the concepts! Don't worry: you are not alone in making that huge mistake, plenty of people do. People that don't give up when confused about notation usually quickly learn that is the concepts and relations between them that requi…

Post by omaranto » Fri, Jul 24, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

MaxBarraclough wrote: post #225

omaranto wrote: post #183

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You are making the huge mistake of assuming that if you hadn't given up when facing difficulty with the notation, the rest would have been easy, that you would have no trouble understanding the concepts! Don't worry: you are not alone in making that huge mistake, plenty of people do. People that don't give up when confused about notation usually quickly learn that is the concepts and relations between them that requi…

You are in no position to assume rytill 'gives up when confused about notation'.

Post by foerbert » Tue, Aug 11, 2020, 8:30 PM UTC

nsonha wrote: post #228

foerbert wrote: post #127

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Except you have instances of misuse of those well-defined symbols and notations. Without any accompanying language it can be very difficult to not only determine that there is an error, but then also figure out how to fix it. And other times in some fields there is a lack of well-defined symbols and notations. I don't recall the specifics, but in game theory there is some notation that is ambiguous. There are two met…

my main argument is that humans only have so much sort term memory so compression is crucial for readability. Reading a proof is different than reading a book because you have to retain the whole thing with details in your mind not just vague ideas.