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The plethora of Greek symbols and italicized fonts for fancy operations make interesting research papers mostly unreadable for me. It would be great if mathemat
by lend000 10y ago
The plethora of Greek symbols and italicized fonts for fancy operations make interesting research papers mostly unreadable for me. It would be great if mathematicians started using descriptive names for each variable (including non-obvious functions/operations), and weren't limited to one letter per symbol (i.e. I'm describing programming).
Granted, there's too much momentum to change anything, especially since it would probably slow down the people doing the fancy math.
- klodolph 10y agoIt's not just momentum. "Non-obvious" is relative. Every mathematical paper is built on top of thousands of pieces of foundational work, how do you pick which pieces of the foundation are obvious and which are non-obvious? And how do we even use descriptive names? Descriptive names were used in older works like Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica which are practically unreadable (even when translated into your native language) compared to more modern ways of writing things like "F=ma", "F=mx''", or "F=m d^2x/dt^2", which are fantastic to understand. Or if I'm writing something like "x+0=x", is there really some descriptive name I can use for "x"? Or in short, we tried that and terse notation tends to be both easier to understand and more concise.