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>Outside of the prohibitively expensive alternative of private tutors, admission to one of these schools was the only means to learning the secret code that ope

>Outside of the prohibitively expensive alternative of private tutors, admission to one of these schools was the only means to learning the secret code that opened the doors of opportunity. Mathematics is built around a similar sort of cipher. Even learning from textbooks is not enough to truly penetrate the collective knowledge stored in the symbols of math. The symbols change from sub field to sub field and in a certain sense encrypt the knowledge from one who has not read all preceding papers. It makes me wonder if one could perform some sort of cryptanalysis on these documents as a method of understanding.

danharaj 11y ago
I did Math in undergrad. I hung out with grads and profs a lot, and of course the bright undergrads who would become the grads and profs who apprehended mathematical concepts far quicker than I ever could. It became clear to me partway through my freshman year that mathematics is an extremely social activity. The books are gappy, the exercises are more open ended than you'd think for something that has a single answer, the lectures are best when they are conversations, and the best place to learn something is at the chalkboard with a cup of tea in hand as someone scratches out a diagram composed of all intuition and no logic that makes you go "aha!" I think all barriers of language are social barriers.
- superuser2 11y ago
  >It became clear to me partway through my freshman year that mathematics is an extremely social activity. I think many fields are like this, and the "dream" of ending selective residential colleges (which are designed to facilitate this kind of social study) in favor of MOOCs may not be so idyllic.
  - danharaj 11y ago
    Definitely, definitely. The idea that individuals achieve through individual means individual rewards does not explain any of my experiences with any of my activities-- especially the ones I get paid for.
cma 11y ago
This page is generally the key, going into the multiple meanings of each symbol across the different subfields: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols And this one can help you search that page if you can't copy-paste a symbol (like if you are reading from a physical text): http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
- mfisher87 11y ago
  That wiki article is fantastic. I want something similar for programming language operators. There are so many operators that do distinct things in different languages. For example: ":", ":=", "=", "::", "->", "{}", "()", "[]" etc. may be slightly or entirely different between two languages. Because there's a lower barrier to entry to creating a new syntax than there is to creating a new branch of mathematics, the programming syntax page would be immensely larger than the Wiki page for mathematical symbols, possibly even warranting a dedicated website.

danharaj 11y ago

I did Math in undergrad. I hung out with grads and profs a lot, and of course the bright undergrads who would become the grads and profs who apprehended mathematical concepts far quicker than I ever could. It became clear to me partway through my freshman year that mathematics is an extremely social activity. The books are gappy, the exercises are more open ended than you'd think for something that has a single answer, the lectures are best when they are conversations, and the best place to learn something is at the chalkboard with a cup of tea in hand as someone scratches out a diagram composed of all intuition and no logic that makes you go "aha!" I think all barriers of language are social barriers.

superuser2 11y ago
>It became clear to me partway through my freshman year that mathematics is an extremely social activity. I think many fields are like this, and the "dream" of ending selective residential colleges (which are designed to facilitate this kind of social study) in favor of MOOCs may not be so idyllic.
- danharaj 11y ago
  Definitely, definitely. The idea that individuals achieve through individual means individual rewards does not explain any of my experiences with any of my activities-- especially the ones I get paid for.

cma 11y ago

This page is generally the key, going into the multiple meanings of each symbol across the different subfields: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols And this one can help you search that page if you can't copy-paste a symbol (like if you are reading from a physical text): http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html

mfisher87 11y ago
That wiki article is fantastic. I want something similar for programming language operators. There are so many operators that do distinct things in different languages. For example: ":", ":=", "=", "::", "->", "{}", "()", "[]" etc. may be slightly or entirely different between two languages. Because there's a lower barrier to entry to creating a new syntax than there is to creating a new branch of mathematics, the programming syntax page would be immensely larger than the Wiki page for mathematical symbols, possibly even warranting a dedicated website.