> Because mathamaticians have thousands of years of history where they learned how to write math in a way that is readable to other mathamaticians. No, actuall

> Because mathamaticians have thousands of years of history where they learned how to write math in a way that is readable to other mathamaticians. No, actually, they learned to write math in a way which is a trade-off between readability and ease of writing (which is perfectly ok). The problem is exactly with thousands of years of history: the notation which is convenient to write on a clay tablet or papyrus scroll is not necessarily the best notation to use in an interactive document format displayed on computer screen. Fiction writers have as long a history as mathematicians (or much longer) but they don't insist on writing in Latin or Middle English. It is arrogant to think that the notation and practices of contemporary mathematicians are ideal and impossible to improve in any way. Lastly, writing for other mathematicians is a problem in its own right. There is a difference between conducting your day to day work, where you can write your equations on clay tablets for all I care and writing an article with a purpose of explaining your work to others. Most of the math papers completely ignore this and instead of honestly explaining the matter, authors focus on promoting themselves as great scientists. There is a lot that can be done to improve understandability (I used "readability" for this earlier, but understandability seems to fit better), to reduce the time needed to read and understand math papers. It would benefit everyone, yet almost nobody does it. There are reasons for this, I'm sure, but it still makes everyone worse off.