Going through Calc III for the first time. I can't imagine how many more trees I would destroy if I had to write out double integrals longhand. Not to mention,

Going through Calc III for the first time. I can't imagine how many more trees I would destroy if I had to write out double integrals longhand. Not to mention, it would make it a lot harder to reason about everything going on... When I first started in my adult adventure in math (never doing well with it academically, I started on pre-calc with Khan Academy about a year and a half ago; I'm now working through multivariable calculus on MIT OCW), I used scratch mode in emacs because hey, I'm right there on the computer. I gave up and started using graph paper as my scratch pretty quickly :) I can't imagine trying to actually _do_ math with something "descriptive" like LaTeX. Math, from what I've come to realize, is less about describing how to compute something and more about describing something in such a way that it can be manipulated in order to reveal something new. And that's why the obtuse iconography is popular in math, and why the obtuse iconography of APL never became truly mainstream in programming.