The purpose is completely different! Here's one of several important reasons. You wouldn't survive doing math with longer variable names. Imagine yourself writ

The purpose is completely different! Here's one of several important reasons. You wouldn't survive doing math with longer variable names. Imagine yourself writing "time" every time you need to write it in a formula in the course of a working on a problem. Just expand the following expression (time + 2)(2time - 3)(4time + 5) by hand, writing "time" every time. Or imagine studying vector calculus and writing out the formulas with the long names like "grad", "curl", etc. That kind of notation was replaces with the nabla symbol and overloaded notation for a very good reason. Also, most derivations, for simple formulas even, go through larger complexities before they converge to something slick. Take a look at the derivation of the Navier-Stokes equations [1] and see if you could have done the same thing with longer variable, function and operator names. So yea, it all boils down to repetition and quantity. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivation_of_the_Navier%E2%80%93Stokes_equations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivation_of_the_Navier%E2%80...