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I’m not going to defend single letter names (although shortness does have some virtue compared to some monstrous naming conventions), but... Most math texts ha

I’m not going to defend single letter names (although shortness does have some virtue compared to some monstrous naming conventions), but... Most math texts have a fair amount of documentation when formulas are introduced. Perhaps substantially more than the table in this article.

kazinator 9y ago
Math papers on the other hand assume that the reader has recursively traversed and read all of the citations and knows most of the notation.
- xyzzyz 9y ago
  Of course, that’s the whole point of citations and notation. Do you want every single paper to be 500+ pages? I have better things to do trying to figure out where the novel result is in hundreds of pages of the same shit I’ve seen dozens of time already.