There is a definitely antipattern that comes from mathematics where variables are cryptic in an effort to look like math, and also I believe to try and show off

There is a definitely antipattern that comes from mathematics where variables are cryptic in an effort to look like math, and also I believe to try and show off how smart your are. However, in some domains, the single letter variables become standard. In IR, w means word, d means document, D means the document corpus, and the like. Of course, w sometimes means "weight" when applied to a x, which maybe mean an document d. It's a damn mess.