> Also, I think that making formulas smaller makes it easier for the eye to see the whole formula together. This makes it easier to quickly understand the meani

> Also, I think that making formulas smaller makes it easier for the eye to see the whole formula together. This makes it easier to quickly understand the meaning of the formula, at least once you've got used to the notation for that particular area of mathematics Not only this, but the notation itself is often intentionally used as a particular abstraction to aid intuition, see bsilvereagle's example of Einstein notation below as a great example. This makes things easier to reason about with our human brains even when dealing with very complex ideas. The abstraction is usually leaky, however, and some notation that aids intuition in one way often makes some other interpretation horribly verbose and unintuitive. Hence the need for more than one notation for the same situation. All of which isn't to excuse the many historical accidents that haven't been winnowed out by our predecessors. That's often a cultural problem, however, and while some of it can be realistically fixed by teaching the same way we teach good grammar, some of it is as hopeless to rail against as asking to fix every irregular conjugation in the english language. Good luck with that, honestly.