4 ms·

It's not arcane notation, it's content-aware compression at work. When a mathematician sees a small greek delta with subscripts ij, they immediately know it's t

It's not arcane notation, it's content-aware compression at work. When a mathematician sees a small greek delta with subscripts ij, they immediately know it's the Kronecker delta. If every paper would explain every convention and notation in the field, all papers would be huge and much less readable for those working in the field.

agumonkey 10y ago
In other words, slang.
- varjag 10y ago
  No, the vocabulary. Slang is an alternative language for common concepts, not the case with math.
- dllthomas 10y ago
  Jargon.
- gilgoomesh 10y ago
  Slang is colloquial, local and rapidly changing. Technical language is formal, usually widespread and entrenched.
- coldtea 10y ago
  No, the very opposite of slang. Slang is created and perpetuated mostly for fun or historically for hiding from others (e.g. gay slang, black slang, thief slang), changes quickly, and doesn't compress much information, mostly encodes a word with a different word. The only common thing with slang is that its a dialect constrained to a specific group of the population (mathematicians).
Someone 10y ago
Indeed. Making it easier for beginners to read is like writing: // This is where your code starts executing int main( int argc, char *argv[]) { // repeat 10 times, with i counting up from zero up to nine for( int i = 0; i < 10; i += 1) { ... } }
imron 10y ago
Yes, it's very much this. There is so much established convention and if you don't know that convention, then it involves a non-trivial amount of time to work through it and figure it out.
- Xcelerate 10y ago
  I remember the first time I saw \mathbb{R}^n. I thought "What the heck does that mean?!" I wish more time had been utilized in high school to explain all of the notation that I would need to know later on. It's difficult to Google symbols. (More recently, I spent a few hours trying to figure what a box with a times symbol in it means — in the context of the paper I was reading, it turned out to be the outer tensor product of linear group representations. Who would have guessed that?)
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    FWIW, crosses inside something is standard notation for exterior products. And, how do you introduce that in high school? Would you be able to wrap your head around the generic concept of exterior products back then?

agumonkey 10y ago

In other words, slang.

varjag 10y ago
No, the vocabulary. Slang is an alternative language for common concepts, not the case with math.
dllthomas 10y ago
Jargon.
gilgoomesh 10y ago
Slang is colloquial, local and rapidly changing. Technical language is formal, usually widespread and entrenched.
coldtea 10y ago
No, the very opposite of slang. Slang is created and perpetuated mostly for fun or historically for hiding from others (e.g. gay slang, black slang, thief slang), changes quickly, and doesn't compress much information, mostly encodes a word with a different word. The only common thing with slang is that its a dialect constrained to a specific group of the population (mathematicians).

Someone 10y ago

Indeed. Making it easier for beginners to read is like writing: // This is where your code starts executing int main( int argc, char *argv[]) { // repeat 10 times, with i counting up from zero up to nine for( int i = 0; i < 10; i += 1) { ... } }

imron 10y ago

Yes, it's very much this. There is so much established convention and if you don't know that convention, then it involves a non-trivial amount of time to work through it and figure it out.

Xcelerate 10y ago
I remember the first time I saw \mathbb{R}^n. I thought "What the heck does that mean?!" I wish more time had been utilized in high school to explain all of the notation that I would need to know later on. It's difficult to Google symbols. (More recently, I spent a few hours trying to figure what a box with a times symbol in it means — in the context of the paper I was reading, it turned out to be the outer tensor product of linear group representations. Who would have guessed that?)
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  FWIW, crosses inside something is standard notation for exterior products. And, how do you introduce that in high school? Would you be able to wrap your head around the generic concept of exterior products back then?