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I'm glad I'm not the only person like this. I've never liked tradition math notation and found it about as useful as traditional musical notation, that is, hard
by f38zf5vdt 5y ago
I'm glad I'm not the only person like this. I've never liked tradition math notation and found it about as useful as traditional musical notation, that is, hard to read for the layman and for no other reason than "this is how people have been doing it for a long time". Maybe I'm the minority, but when I read a CS paper I mostly ignore the maths and then go to the source code or pseudocode to see how the algorithm was implemented.
- ColinWright 5y ago> ...for no other reason than "this is how people have been doing it for a long time". I disagree. Math notation has evolved to be as it is because it is useful for the purpose of doing math. If there were some way of doing it better, people would be evolving to be doing so. In some ways they are ... people are using computer algebra packages more for a lot of the grunt work, and are using proof assistants to verify some things, but there's a lot of math that's still done by sketching why something is true and letting the reader work through it. Math notation isn't about executing algorithms, it's about communicating what the result is, and why it works. "Doing Math" is not "Writing Programs", so math notation is different.
- KptMarchewa 5y ago> If there were some way of doing it better, people would be evolving to be doing so. I don't see why wouldn't it be some kind of local maximum. Maybe there are better ways, but they are sufficiently far away from current notation, that they aren't even thought about.
- marcosdumay 5y agoHum... Apart from math, music notation maps linearly from the symbols to the instrument positions and time. It's absolutely not used only because "this is how people have been doing it for a long time". It's a very efficient notation to decode.