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Hey, I'm doing a pure math/CS double major so I can probably answer your question. I honestly prefer notation to be as terse as possible when reading/writing pr
by zodiac 11y ago
Hey, I'm doing a pure math/CS double major so I can probably answer your question. I honestly prefer notation to be as terse as possible when reading/writing proofs. Oh either case reading notation is a tiny part of the effort needed to do math - if you force me to read papers using explicit, verbose notation I wouldn't complain too much. I have no idea why I would throw a tantrum.
IME verbose notation makes it easier to "type check" an equation or expression, but checking a proof is much more involved than that.
- klibertp 11y agoThanks, I hear about the terseness often and I agree it's convenient, what I want is a more formal and unambiguous way of making things terse. A bit more consistency doesn't have to come at the expense of terseness and expressiveness. And while you're obviously right that syntactic issues constitute just a minor part of work (at least after you're fluent in a language), the time you spend on them does add up in the long run. Not to mention such issues increase the barrier to entry for the new users unnecessarily...
- zodiac 11y ago> A bit more consistency doesn't have to come at the expense of terseness and expressiveness. Yeah, mathematicians are often ambiguous out of laziness, because they have no incentive to make it terse+unambiguous, and making it terse+unambiguous takes more effort than making it terse. Also sometimes you cannot get maximal terseness and unambiguity at the same time. For example if f is a function of 2 real variables, you fix the first to be x_0 and take the derivative with respect to the second, I would write this as f'(x_0, y), but I'm sure you agree that this is ambiguous to some people.