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>Math is hard to understand. Because of the concepts used. >I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character Using emojis for

>Math is hard to understand. Because of the concepts used. >I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character Using emojis for variables won't help with that. >Every scientific domain has its usual notation for specific concepts Does that imply each emoji be used for a single concept across all domains? Not only that won't be possible (considering people don't even always use same variable for something, e.g. Pythagorean theorem being a^2+b^2=c^2, α^2+β^2=γ^2, x^2+y^2=c^2, ...) but is also a bad idea even if it could work as it will imply you've to remember every single emoji used. Again, math is about concepts not what symbol you use for a variable. Using emojis won't make anything easier to teach or to understand.

beambot 6y ago
I find it ironic that your examples were single-character roman & greek letters. Why not Cyrillic? Phoenician? I wouldn't use pictograms everywhere, but they could be elegant in certain contexts. E.g. having a dedicated pictogram for various base physics quantities (e.g. for mass, length, time, etc).
- qsort 6y ago
  Because the latin and greek alphabets are widely known and understood, at least an order of magnitude more than Cyrillic and at least seven orders of magnitude more than Phoenician. This is like asking why I'm writing in English even though it's not my native language, I do that because almost every educated person understands English, while almost nobody would understand if I wrote in Italian. Pictograms would be difficult to standardize and hard to reproduce, unless you commit to a small set of them, which would just become an alphabet in disguise.
  - beambot 6y ago
    I appreciate the Western convention, but a significant fraction of the world uses pictogram-like written languages (e.g. Chinese). Using pictograms to represent words or concepts isn't that far-fetched.
    - codethief 6y ago
      Yes, and there is a reason why Chinese is so hard to learn: There are so many characters that learning them takes years.
      - alexvoda 6y ago
        Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. And the wealth of symbols of chinese script is beneficial to mathematical notation where names are forced to be single character. They are descriptive and diverse which cannot be said about latin or greek letters. But they are foreign to westerners. The real issue is forcing names to be of single character lenght.
        codethief 6y ago
        > Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. It has everything to do with the current discussion. GP was suggesting that a "pictogram-like written language […] isn't that far-fetched". And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese. That time is much better spent wrapping one's head around the math itself.
        alexvoda 6y ago
        > And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese or oher asian scripts. And my counter to that is that the same way you do not learn greek in order to use some greek characters in math, the same way you do not learn chinese in order to use some chinese characters in math. There are cases where "Δ" read as "delta" makes perfect sense for the delta between two values. Whereas "η" read as "eta" is not a obvious synonym for efficiency, or for the coefficient of viscosity, or for the metric tensor in Quantum Field Theory. And "c" read as "c" is not an obvious synonym for speed of light, or for 100, or for the space of convergent sequences. But "光" read as "Guāng"(chinese) or "hikari"(japanese) or "light"(english) might be obvious for something related to light. You do not need to learn the original pronunciation of the character to use it. Just have a 1 to 1 mapping between notation and notion. Same way Chinese and Japanese have completely incompatible pronunciations for the same characters. And even better, just use words instead of characters.
  - CJefferson 6y ago
    I'll willing to bet a significant chunk of the "emoji" alphabet is better known and understood than the Greek alphabet nowadays. It is true you would have to stay in some reasonable-sized subset, and I can't begin to imagine the arguments if someone tried to define "common emoji" or something..
- codethief 6y ago
  > E.g. having a dedicated pictogram for various base physics quantities (e.g. for mass, length, time, etc). What if you have two different lengths, one being the distance between two objects and the other being the position of the center of mass over time? What about their two masses? And, in relativity, their two proper times? Now you're back to using subscripts and the Latin alphabet because what better way to describe the precise object you're talking about in a given language (here: English) than the language itself?
alexvoda 6y ago
>>I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character >Using emojis for variables won't help with that. Yes, they will, because there is an amount of meaning embedded in the graphical shape of the emoji used whereas there is none for a greek/chirillic/phoenician/etc. character. But the real solution is to not limit names to a single character. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527

beambot 6y ago

I find it ironic that your examples were single-character roman & greek letters. Why not Cyrillic? Phoenician? I wouldn't use pictograms everywhere, but they could be elegant in certain contexts. E.g. having a dedicated pictogram for various base physics quantities (e.g. for mass, length, time, etc).

qsort 6y ago
Because the latin and greek alphabets are widely known and understood, at least an order of magnitude more than Cyrillic and at least seven orders of magnitude more than Phoenician. This is like asking why I'm writing in English even though it's not my native language, I do that because almost every educated person understands English, while almost nobody would understand if I wrote in Italian. Pictograms would be difficult to standardize and hard to reproduce, unless you commit to a small set of them, which would just become an alphabet in disguise.
- beambot 6y ago
  I appreciate the Western convention, but a significant fraction of the world uses pictogram-like written languages (e.g. Chinese). Using pictograms to represent words or concepts isn't that far-fetched.
  - codethief 6y ago
    Yes, and there is a reason why Chinese is so hard to learn: There are so many characters that learning them takes years.
    - alexvoda 6y ago
      Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. And the wealth of symbols of chinese script is beneficial to mathematical notation where names are forced to be single character. They are descriptive and diverse which cannot be said about latin or greek letters. But they are foreign to westerners. The real issue is forcing names to be of single character lenght.
      - codethief 6y ago
        > Chinese being difficult to learn has nothing to do with the current discussion. It has everything to do with the current discussion. GP was suggesting that a "pictogram-like written language […] isn't that far-fetched". And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese. That time is much better spent wrapping one's head around the math itself.
        alexvoda 6y ago
        > And I was countering that argument by saying that a large alphabet (a large set of pictograms) is hard to learn or at least takes a lot time, as can be seen from trying to learn Chinese or oher asian scripts. And my counter to that is that the same way you do not learn greek in order to use some greek characters in math, the same way you do not learn chinese in order to use some chinese characters in math. There are cases where "Δ" read as "delta" makes perfect sense for the delta between two values. Whereas "η" read as "eta" is not a obvious synonym for efficiency, or for the coefficient of viscosity, or for the metric tensor in Quantum Field Theory. And "c" read as "c" is not an obvious synonym for speed of light, or for 100, or for the space of convergent sequences. But "光" read as "Guāng"(chinese) or "hikari"(japanese) or "light"(english) might be obvious for something related to light. You do not need to learn the original pronunciation of the character to use it. Just have a 1 to 1 mapping between notation and notion. Same way Chinese and Japanese have completely incompatible pronunciations for the same characters. And even better, just use words instead of characters.
- CJefferson 6y ago
  I'll willing to bet a significant chunk of the "emoji" alphabet is better known and understood than the Greek alphabet nowadays. It is true you would have to stay in some reasonable-sized subset, and I can't begin to imagine the arguments if someone tried to define "common emoji" or something..
codethief 6y ago
> E.g. having a dedicated pictogram for various base physics quantities (e.g. for mass, length, time, etc). What if you have two different lengths, one being the distance between two objects and the other being the position of the center of mass over time? What about their two masses? And, in relativity, their two proper times? Now you're back to using subscripts and the Latin alphabet because what better way to describe the precise object you're talking about in a given language (here: English) than the language itself?

alexvoda 6y ago

>>I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character >Using emojis for variables won't help with that. Yes, they will, because there is an amount of meaning embedded in the graphical shape of the emoji used whereas there is none for a greek/chirillic/phoenician/etc. character. But the real solution is to not limit names to a single character. See my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527