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I disagree. In maths, the main competition is Greek letters. Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I find many undergrads can't remember th

I disagree. In maths, the main competition is Greek letters. Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I find many undergrads can't remember the Greek alphabet. Sure, girl wearing hat might be a bad choice, but I think "simple emoji like tree, fire, snowflake (for example). Do a good job of replacing Greek letters. Another place I use emoji, is for a set of Labella which should have no order. Mathematica a often say they are naming some things 1,2,3, but please forget the integers have arthmetic and ordering. If you use fire, tree, snowflake as the names, no-one assumes an ordering, or arithmetic.

yorwba 6y ago
> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I was inclined to agree with you, but then I remembered the zodiac sign emoji. Capricorn is basically η with a looped tail and taurus is gamma ɣ with a bigger loop. I'm pretty sure kids wouldn't be able to write them by hand (neither would I), but they have the advantage that if you type their names on a phone keyboard, you just need to recognize the symbol and tap it. Maybe all that's needed for Greek letters to compete with emoji is equal treatment by keyboards.
blackbear_ 6y ago
> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I find many undergrads can't remember the Greek alphabet. Not sure what is the problem here. Even without knowing Greek nor the Greek alphabet, its letters are sufficiently diverse and can be easily told apart. I can understand emojis can make math more enciting for young children, but if high school+ people cannot get past foreign-looking Greek letters I doubt they would find the motivation to progress much further in understanding the concepts involved.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  In undergrad lectures I constantly have students refering to "fork" or "curly n", or just misnaming different Greek letters (and, I find myself sometimes doing the same). The Greek is (to me) unnessary block to discussion.
  - alexvoda 6y ago
    And greek letters and emoji have the same issue of dificult type-ability, non-ASCII-ness, dificult printability and dificult displayability. Emoji only add color. The real solution is normal multicharacter names.
    - CJefferson 6y ago
      I am happy for people to hate emoji, but I don't think non-ASCII-ness is a problem (lots of languages aren't in ASCII anywhere), and in general printing and displaying is easy -- it seems I can type emojis basically anywhere I can type anything else. True, they don't display well in terminals, but I wouldn't not be willing to limit my maths to an ASCII monospaced terminal anyway, and that isn't how anyone writes or creates maths (unless they are typing LaTeX, in which case it will be nicely formatted anyway). I want super/sub scripts.
      - alexvoda 6y ago
        The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them: > Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021
        CJefferson 6y ago
        I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons. emoji are perfectly usable by screen readers -- if we really wanted to help people with screen readers we would move on from unstructured terminal output and programs which just dump screens of data. You know that thing that sometimes happens when a program running in the background outputs to the terminal -- that REALLY messes up screen readers.
        alexvoda 6y ago
        Fair enough. We should make sure software including screen readers properly support Unicode in a useful way. Lack of support in the present is not a reason to avoid emoji. And math notation is already very non-ASCII so arguments related to plain text mode debugging are not applicable. There is probably an argument to be made about color blindness. But overall my argument is that emoji are not a solution to the problem of very limited naming options for things in math, lack of significance of the symbol used and that of homonymity . The solution is using words. And those words may contain Unicode characters. And alias longer names to symbols on case by case basis.
goto11 6y ago
> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. Are you saying kids will not be able to distinguish between the two symbols? I highly doubt that. They may not remember the names of the symbols, but emojis have the same problem.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  Sorry, yes I mean they won't know how to say them out loud, which makes discussion hard, whereas they will know snowflake or fire. Heck, I teach graph theory and I keep forgetting the damn names mid-lecture.
- alexvoda 6y ago
  Yes. You have to memorize the mapping between the meaning and arbitrary Greek letters whereas the meaning is more obvious with emoji. But both (greek letters, emoji) are bad solutions to a very stupid problem math has. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527

yorwba 6y ago

> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I was inclined to agree with you, but then I remembered the zodiac sign emoji. Capricorn is basically η with a looped tail and taurus is gamma ɣ with a bigger loop. I'm pretty sure kids wouldn't be able to write them by hand (neither would I), but they have the advantage that if you type their names on a phone keyboard, you just need to recognize the symbol and tap it. Maybe all that's needed for Greek letters to compete with emoji is equal treatment by keyboards.

blackbear_ 6y ago

> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I find many undergrads can't remember the Greek alphabet. Not sure what is the problem here. Even without knowing Greek nor the Greek alphabet, its letters are sufficiently diverse and can be easily told apart. I can understand emojis can make math more enciting for young children, but if high school+ people cannot get past foreign-looking Greek letters I doubt they would find the motivation to progress much further in understanding the concepts involved.

CJefferson 6y ago
In undergrad lectures I constantly have students refering to "fork" or "curly n", or just misnaming different Greek letters (and, I find myself sometimes doing the same). The Greek is (to me) unnessary block to discussion.
- alexvoda 6y ago
  And greek letters and emoji have the same issue of dificult type-ability, non-ASCII-ness, dificult printability and dificult displayability. Emoji only add color. The real solution is normal multicharacter names.
  - CJefferson 6y ago
    I am happy for people to hate emoji, but I don't think non-ASCII-ness is a problem (lots of languages aren't in ASCII anywhere), and in general printing and displaying is easy -- it seems I can type emojis basically anywhere I can type anything else. True, they don't display well in terminals, but I wouldn't not be willing to limit my maths to an ASCII monospaced terminal anyway, and that isn't how anyone writes or creates maths (unless they are typing LaTeX, in which case it will be nicely formatted anyway). I want super/sub scripts.
    - alexvoda 6y ago
      The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them: > Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021
      - CJefferson 6y ago
        I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons. emoji are perfectly usable by screen readers -- if we really wanted to help people with screen readers we would move on from unstructured terminal output and programs which just dump screens of data. You know that thing that sometimes happens when a program running in the background outputs to the terminal -- that REALLY messes up screen readers.
        alexvoda 6y ago
        Fair enough. We should make sure software including screen readers properly support Unicode in a useful way. Lack of support in the present is not a reason to avoid emoji. And math notation is already very non-ASCII so arguments related to plain text mode debugging are not applicable. There is probably an argument to be made about color blindness. But overall my argument is that emoji are not a solution to the problem of very limited naming options for things in math, lack of significance of the symbol used and that of homonymity . The solution is using words. And those words may contain Unicode characters. And alias longer names to symbols on case by case basis.

goto11 6y ago

> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. Are you saying kids will not be able to distinguish between the two symbols? I highly doubt that. They may not remember the names of the symbols, but emojis have the same problem.

CJefferson 6y ago
Sorry, yes I mean they won't know how to say them out loud, which makes discussion hard, whereas they will know snowflake or fire. Heck, I teach graph theory and I keep forgetting the damn names mid-lecture.
alexvoda 6y ago
Yes. You have to memorize the mapping between the meaning and arbitrary Greek letters whereas the meaning is more obvious with emoji. But both (greek letters, emoji) are bad solutions to a very stupid problem math has. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527