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I think that the short variable names in math come from the time when these things had to be written out in long hand on blackboards. You ever see old sci-fi m
by narrator 11y ago
I think that the short variable names in math come from the time when these things had to be written out in long hand on blackboards. You ever see old sci-fi movies, like "The Day The Earth Stood Still" where professors are working out ideas on huge blackboards? Having long variable names wouldn't fit on the blackboard and would be slow and hurt your hands.
- wtallis 11y agoThe lack of an efficient IME for verbose math input on a computer certainly accounts for why math is still terse when done in real-time such as when extemporaneous lectures or when working something out. But I don't think it fully explains why the convention persists even in published works that took months or years to prepare; there's got to be a significant effect for the readers and not just the writers. If a longhand style of presentation were as clearly superior for mathematics as for software source code, one probably would have caught on by now.
- narrator 11y agoIt's probably just the weight of tradition from the longhand days that leads people to use the short variable names, not that it's somehow better, even on a computer. All it would probably take would be for someone to start a math journal that required a minimum of three letter variable names and everyone would switch over.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y agoWho would want to submit to such a journal?