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> Think of it as jumping into a new codebase you have never worked with before. It is full of strange functions calling each other for unknown reasons. It takes

> Think of it as jumping into a new codebase you have never worked with before. It is full of strange functions calling each other for unknown reasons. It takes a while to get a good intuition for why. I think about this analogy from time to time, when I get frustrated by maths. Myself not being mathematician but on occasion needing to read a research paper, my frustration is typically begins with the raw syntax of maths. It’s so obviously optimized for the combined limitations of the human brain’s limited short term memory and the human hand’s speed of writing/typing. Which probably is the correct optimization for high level practitioners. For communication with non experts, it’s dreadful, but I think fixable post-facto with a auto-notation tool. Think black.py for maths.

samatman 5y ago
Here's the lens I use, hopefully it will help. A terse equation or statement in mathematics represents what you will understand, the rest of the paper is to get you there. Wanting to read the main equations and understand them, so as to use that knowledge reading the paper, is backward. If the main equation was ax^2+bx+c=0, you wouldn't need to read the paper, right? It's about the quadratic equation, it's aimed at primary students. But that's how it works, we keep pounding away at the paper: taking notes, following references, thinking a lot about each of the definitions, then eventually, you look at the main equation and say "oh. ok. I know what this says now".