>You read the book. Start on page one. Eventually you get to a formula. You can scrape the text all you want, but there are characters without a definition. If

>You read the book. Start on page one. Eventually you get to a formula. You can scrape the text all you want, but there are characters without a definition. If I remember correctly, this is much more common with more elementary math books which are presumably trying to be more informal and 'user friendly'. You might seek out a book pitched at a more advanced level which will be much more formal (and pedantic) if that is the kind of thing that's bothering you. Also many books will have an 'index of notation' inserted at either the beginning or the end, so make sure to look for it - if it's there, the author might assume you know the convention and won't necessarily define everything in the exposition. ----- One note about abstraction in mathematics vs computer programming. When model something in a program, you are often modeling a particular thing, or kind of thing, so it makes sense to give it a descriptive name. Contrast that with, say, a number: I have a small or medium or large pile of apples. I make the adjective more precise and say I have a 3 or 6 or 25 -pile of apples. Then i notice there's nothing special about apples, I can do the same thing for piles of rocks or tea bags. And I can do the same thing for non-piles, like links in a fence, or countries, or more abstract things like counting permutations or combinations or discrete transformations of whatever you can imagine. The point being: in mathematics you are not working with a particular kind of thing, you are noticing patterns satisfied by many very very different kinds of things (hence the lack of descriptive names - there is often not much to describe). You stop asking questions about what it is, and learn to characterize things entirely by the logical properties they satisfy. Its a different thought process than what you might be accustomed to.