7 ms·

Every time someone makes a "free mathematica", my first question is "can I write, and see, maths as actual maths instead of as programming statement?" and every

Every time someone makes a "free mathematica", my first question is "can I write, and see, maths as actual maths instead of as programming statement?" and every time so far the answer has been "no". So... can I write, and see, maths as actual maths?

davnn 4y ago
I understand the wish, and Mathematica does a pretty great job of making the mathematical notation less ambiguous, but I‘m surprised that this would be your highest priority. Do you actually enjoy writing in math notation?
- laingc 4y ago
  If you’re a working mathematician, it’s the only way you think.
  - esperent 4y ago
    If you are the X then you must do/be Y is called gatekeeping. And of course this is not true. I know mathematicians who work almost exclusively on a computer, and others who have an old dusty computer from 20 years ago in the corner of their office that they barely touch. Most are somewhere in between.
    - qubex 4y ago
      Mathematics is one of the oldest disciplines in the world. Grumbling about the legacy of its ancient history as ‘gatekeeping’ is puerile.
      - Beldin 4y ago
        This started worth talking about notation. Notation of mathematics has changed significantly over time - Newton's Principae is not readable without accounting for changes. In the history of maths, that is a fairly recent work.
        qubex 4y ago
        I actually agree with your premise: mathematics and it’s notations (plural) are ancient. The current notations are those that were found to be most convenient by centuries of practice by expert practitioners.
        tikej 4y ago
        This is of course very true but doesn’t take into account invention of computer that is relatively recent. Since it in principle never makes mistakes (in practice there are of course bugs, but they are usually different in nature than human errors) it changes what is possible and most convenient. You no longer have to optimise for simplicity as heavily for example. On the other hand computers basically can’t deal with ambiguity, so the rules and statements have to be stated very simply and clearly. EDIT: One example that comes to mind are indexes in functions. Usually they are just additional arguments that are different somehow from the “main” arguments, for example often being non-negative integers. For humans it makes it easier to think and operate about indices separately from the rest of arguments. But for the computer it’s all the same, as all arguments are treated just as argument, (of course it depends on the implementation etc) and there is no need to treat them separately, since every argument is “special”. I believe computers can change the landscape of what’s best notation. This is an interesting, interdisciplinary topic to explore.
        Qem 4y ago
        I think APL was originally created as a fix to this problem. A completely revamped math notation to make it more fit to computers as a medium, instead of pen and paper.
        hilbert42 4y ago
        If it was created thus then it could hardly be considered successful. To all but the dedicated and obsessive cognoscenti APL is nothing but gobbledygook.
    - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
      > If you are the X then you must do/be Y is called gatekeeping. Let's be precise here: the parent hasn't used "must" here, just stated their observation. It's possible that many if not most mathematicians work this way, but it's not definitely the only one, and it doesn't mean it can't be changed. Actually, there is a lot of work being done on theorem provers, for example.
    - traverseda 4y ago
      If you are a python programmer you must program in python.
- adastra22 4y ago
  Yes. I'm sorry but how is this not obvious? Do you enjoy hand-writing code on paper? The natural medium for math is on whiteboards and paper. A computer algebra system like Mathematica is useful, but it augments what is traditionally a paper-and-pencil activity. It makes sense that the standard notation for math is something that is amenable to physical tools. And it makes sense that the computer tools to assist mathematicians should more closely match this standard notation.
- dagw 4y ago
  In many cases yes. Especially non-programmers really like that the equation they type into their software looks exactly the the equation in the paper they are copying it from.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Who said it was my highest priority? Obviously having a solver is the highest priority, but it turns out that if you purport to have made a mathematica competitor, that was the baseline. If you don't have that, you have nothing. So the question is never "can it do what it needs to", it's always "can it do the things which keep me using Mathematica, instead of Sage, like letting me compose notebooks that contain, and show, actual maths?" And yes, I enjoy writing in math notation because it's an immediately understandable notation compared to 500 character programming statement.
lokedhs 4y ago
I'm not sure you'd want to write maths that way. Every WYSIWYG equation editor I've used are very annoying to work with. Displaying equations is a different thing and it's supported by many tools. Maxima for example has wxMaxima: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxmaxima/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxmaxima/ I've also been working on a different UI for Maxima: https://peertube.functional.cafe/w/qnx1onPEx9LCtDP3wFqjWz https://peertube.functional.cafe/w/qnx1onPEx9LCtDP3wFqjWz
- tgv 4y ago
  I sometimes use wxMaxima. For my needs it works perfectly fine. Nice to know there are people working on the interface, because you definitely need to know quite a bit about different functions with similar tasks. Would you know how Mathics compares to Maxima? Mathics' information is pretty sparse.
- richardw 4y ago
  I’d guess the end state is: tablet, stylus and convert scrawls into print-worthy output. Many pitfalls along the way I’m sure but nothing will beat just drawing what you mean.
- anigbrowl 4y ago
  Surprised nobody has made an app that lets you photograph/cut & paste formulae from books or web pages, or just write with a stylus. It's the layout with keyboard and mouse that's the stumbling block. There's lots of good options for symbolic logic, numeric analysis etc.
  - munch117 4y ago
    You underestimate how hard the problem is. Things that in other fields would be minor typographical differences are often semantically meaningful in traditional math notation. Formula OCR would need to distinguish chi from x, lowercase delta from o with an overbar, a dot-product dot from a dot intended as multiplication, parentheses from brackets, v from the or sign. It needs to be able to determine whether your fraction "a / b / c" (by / I mean horizontal lines) was intended as "a / (b / c)" or "(a / b) / c" from the size of your letters, or from the relative widths of the fraction lines. Of course, anything a human can do, ML can learn to do eventually. Which invites the question: is reading arbitrary hand-written math actually something any human can do?
sterlind 4y ago
in Mathematica at least, you can use TraditionalForm to format your equations like maths. and what's more, you can edit things in that form without dropping out of it. you can also make palettes for commonly used symbols and such. it's not a magic blackboard, but with the symbolic nature of Mathematica and the rendering, it's kinda close.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  Indeed, so does this have that?
larryliu 4y ago
what about recognizing handwritten math? https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition
hmottestad 4y ago
I agree. Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha are amazing because of how close they get to maths as it is taught in school, uni and through books. There are many other ways of working with maths. Graphing calculators are very common, and some models even have proper algebra support. There are also the likes of Matlab, R, Python + numpy, and obviously the addition of Jupyter notebooks. “Mathematica®-compatible syntax and functions” seems to be the main selling point of Mathics. I presume that this means that I can copy-paste Mathematica examples I find online or that are shared with my by someone else.
loa_in_ 4y ago
A simplistic but nice application for Android I found looking for this after reading parent's comment. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.mathlab.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.mathlab.and... (Adware/Non-free/closed source)
navane 4y ago
The industry standard (in my industry) software to do that is MathCad, of which version 15 is the peak release. Although not maintained anymore, it is still used a lot today. Because it is not maintained anymore, it doesn't change and has been the same for the past ~15 years. A free, still maintained, alternative of that is smathhttps://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary, which also has a cloud option.
- jopsen 4y ago
  Oh, I miss MathCad, I wish we had a decent FOSS clone.
  - tikej 4y ago
    I find Julia’s Pluto to be reasonably close alternative. Of course it lacks many features, but plugins systems and overall architecture gives hope for possible extension to include many of the desired features.
- phkahler 4y ago
  Wait, Mathcad is unmaintained? What happened?
  - theFco 4y ago
    It became Mathcad Prime that is still maintained and had a release this year.
- data_maan 4y ago
  Which is your industry, if you don't mind me asking?
  - navane 4y ago
    Civil engineering
- benhurmarcel 4y ago
soegaard 4y ago
> my first question is "can I write, and see, maths as actual maths instead of as programming statement?" What would that look like? Do you have a hypothetical example?
- dagw 4y ago
  I suspect they mean they want something like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ymrym.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ymrym.png As opposed to something like def f(x,k) = Sum(k,math.inf, (math.pi*pow(sqrt(x),k))*sin(2*theta*(sqrt(...
  - krsrhe 4y ago
hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
> So... can I write, and see, maths as actual maths? Sorry to be nitpicking, but it seems you conflate "actual maths" with "maths notation we're accustomed to (since the 19 century)". As to what "actual maths" really is, it's an extremely interesting question that belongs to the philosophy of mathematics (mostly).
- aflag 4y ago
  That's indeed a bit of a nitpick. If you're working with maths, going back to your notes and reading them is really important. If your notes look like Sum(k,math.inf, (math.pipow(sqrt(x),k))...)), it's really not great. So, while you're correct that it's just notation, the issue remains that it's much harder to read maths in ascii.
- TheRealPomax 4y ago
  That's not a conflation, that is using the word "actual" correctly. Amusingly, the one thing that the word "actual" does not permit is leading the conversation to that "extremely interesting question": the word "actual" forces an interlocutor to consider only those contexts in which the thing in question is a real, existing thing. "Actual" is a no-hypotheticals-or-philosophical-ponderings zone =) In this case, that real thing would be modern maths notations. So this is kind of artificial nitpicking: English is not a zero-context language, you are still required and expected to understand the context words are used in based on understanding that they wouldn't make a lot of sense in other -even related- contexts. Of course, if I'd been glib and said this: > So... can I write, and see, maths? Then the insinuation that maths and programming are mutually exclusive concepts should definitely lead to a philosophical discussion.
  - graphpapa 4y ago
    I think you’ve just each used a different sense of the word ‘actual’. Sense 1) “‘Actual’ mathematics does not consist in notational embodiments” ‘Actual’ as in essence rather than appearance, territory rather than map. Implies platonic reality of an eternal ephemeral mathematics. Conceived of as beyond and beneath all the particulars of any given representation. Sense 2) “‘Actual’ mathematics consists in notational embodiments” ‘Actual’ as in embodied. Material. That ‘actual’ mathematics is the set of mathematics which has been ‘actually’ done. You describe the second sense as self evident but with mathematics in particular this is bound to cause trouble. The sense ‘actual as in essence’ is perfectly reasonable and has a particular affinity to a discussion of mathematics. I find it hard to even write the description of the second sense without tying some linguistic knot. If ‘actual’ mathematics is its embodiments, what is the thing being embodied? Either the notation embodies nothing (what does it mean to describe the characteristics of a thing which doesn’t exist?) or if it does refer to something then according to the designation of embodied mathematics as ‘material’ then it embodies something which exists immaterially. So either mathematics describes the characteristics of a non existing thing, or a thing which exists, but exists immaterially. If ‘actual’ mathematics is the materially existing embodied form of a separate immaterial thing, what is that thing? So that ‘Actual mathematics’ is the embodiment of a separate immaterial thing called ‘not actual mathematics’. I’m not trying to make a watertight argument here just trying to outline the course of thought that your assertions inflame. From another angle, what does it mean for something to ‘materially exist’ so that it can be considered ‘actual’. I think this concept so nebulous as to make impossible the patching up of all the holes a cursory investigation reveals. Personally I think the distinction between the two is the root of trouble here. In the sense that anything exists, it exists according to mathematics. The essence of material existence, to the extent that it can be specified, is a structure of formal relational principles. Such formal structures are the domain of mathematics. Of course ‘material existence’ is used and understood perfectly well in ordinary circumstances but when the topic at hand is “what counts as ‘actual’ mathematics?” it seems shaky ground to build a house.
Ciantic 4y ago
Desmos has open source library called MathQuill, which converts typed chars to mathematical representation similar to Mathematica. Sure there is some "programming statements" with some (La)TeX like syntax there, but so does Mathematica too. [1]: http://mathquill.com/ http://mathquill.com/
asoneth 4y ago
Reading these replies, it's surprising to me how many people think that constraining writing a linear sequence of fixed characters is somehow natural as opposed to a simplification made for cost and technical reasons by Gutenberg, typewriters, keyboards, and ASCII. Writing is more than this. Writers can arrange characters in 2d space to convey semantic relationships in equations or among words. You can have multiple degrees of emphasis and italics. You can get a sense of which parts of the equation or prose were written quickly and which were written slowly and carefully. Often it conveys a bit of personality. You can even include small drawings or sketches embedded within the text like Gallelo's illustration of Saturn's rings. I get that we have to strip out this kind of nuance for technical reasons, but claiming that writing ought to be constrained to only what can be represented in plain text feels like claiming that painting should be constrained to only what can be represented in a bitmap.
- traverseda 4y ago
  I have adhd, and personally I find it a lot easier to follow through "math" when it's step by step. When I can say "first this happens, than this". I'm sure part of it is a don't have a great toolbox to break problems down, but personally what you're describing sounds horrible. Like trying to read a book out of order.
- User23 4y ago
  I strongly agree that representing multidimensional structures with one dimensional strings is suboptimal. On the computing side I see this as an editor problem. It’s not hard to conceptualize some multidimensional editor, but evidently it is hard to build one that will overtake the traditional text editors and their not particularly more advanced IDE cousins. The closest such thing I’ve personally used was HyperCard. I think that for real progress in this area we’ll have to abandon the desire to keep editor and language separated.
- bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
  Edward Tufte, is that you?
User23 4y ago
What is “actual maths?”

davnn 4y ago

I understand the wish, and Mathematica does a pretty great job of making the mathematical notation less ambiguous, but I‘m surprised that this would be your highest priority. Do you actually enjoy writing in math notation?

laingc 4y ago
If you’re a working mathematician, it’s the only way you think.
- esperent 4y ago
  If you are the X then you must do/be Y is called gatekeeping. And of course this is not true. I know mathematicians who work almost exclusively on a computer, and others who have an old dusty computer from 20 years ago in the corner of their office that they barely touch. Most are somewhere in between.
  - qubex 4y ago
    Mathematics is one of the oldest disciplines in the world. Grumbling about the legacy of its ancient history as ‘gatekeeping’ is puerile.
    - Beldin 4y ago
      This started worth talking about notation. Notation of mathematics has changed significantly over time - Newton's Principae is not readable without accounting for changes. In the history of maths, that is a fairly recent work.
      - qubex 4y ago
        I actually agree with your premise: mathematics and it’s notations (plural) are ancient. The current notations are those that were found to be most convenient by centuries of practice by expert practitioners.
        tikej 4y ago
        This is of course very true but doesn’t take into account invention of computer that is relatively recent. Since it in principle never makes mistakes (in practice there are of course bugs, but they are usually different in nature than human errors) it changes what is possible and most convenient. You no longer have to optimise for simplicity as heavily for example. On the other hand computers basically can’t deal with ambiguity, so the rules and statements have to be stated very simply and clearly. EDIT: One example that comes to mind are indexes in functions. Usually they are just additional arguments that are different somehow from the “main” arguments, for example often being non-negative integers. For humans it makes it easier to think and operate about indices separately from the rest of arguments. But for the computer it’s all the same, as all arguments are treated just as argument, (of course it depends on the implementation etc) and there is no need to treat them separately, since every argument is “special”. I believe computers can change the landscape of what’s best notation. This is an interesting, interdisciplinary topic to explore.
        Qem 4y ago
        I think APL was originally created as a fix to this problem. A completely revamped math notation to make it more fit to computers as a medium, instead of pen and paper.
        hilbert42 4y ago
        If it was created thus then it could hardly be considered successful. To all but the dedicated and obsessive cognoscenti APL is nothing but gobbledygook.
  - hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago
    > If you are the X then you must do/be Y is called gatekeeping. Let's be precise here: the parent hasn't used "must" here, just stated their observation. It's possible that many if not most mathematicians work this way, but it's not definitely the only one, and it doesn't mean it can't be changed. Actually, there is a lot of work being done on theorem provers, for example.
  - traverseda 4y ago
    If you are a python programmer you must program in python.
adastra22 4y ago
Yes. I'm sorry but how is this not obvious? Do you enjoy hand-writing code on paper? The natural medium for math is on whiteboards and paper. A computer algebra system like Mathematica is useful, but it augments what is traditionally a paper-and-pencil activity. It makes sense that the standard notation for math is something that is amenable to physical tools. And it makes sense that the computer tools to assist mathematicians should more closely match this standard notation.
dagw 4y ago
In many cases yes. Especially non-programmers really like that the equation they type into their software looks exactly the the equation in the paper they are copying it from.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
Who said it was my highest priority? Obviously having a solver is the highest priority, but it turns out that if you purport to have made a mathematica competitor, that was the baseline. If you don't have that, you have nothing. So the question is never "can it do what it needs to", it's always "can it do the things which keep me using Mathematica, instead of Sage, like letting me compose notebooks that contain, and show, actual maths?" And yes, I enjoy writing in math notation because it's an immediately understandable notation compared to 500 character programming statement.

lokedhs 4y ago

I'm not sure you'd want to write maths that way. Every WYSIWYG equation editor I've used are very annoying to work with. Displaying equations is a different thing and it's supported by many tools. Maxima for example has wxMaxima: https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxmaxima/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxmaxima/ I've also been working on a different UI for Maxima: https://peertube.functional.cafe/w/qnx1onPEx9LCtDP3wFqjWz https://peertube.functional.cafe/w/qnx1onPEx9LCtDP3wFqjWz

tgv 4y ago
I sometimes use wxMaxima. For my needs it works perfectly fine. Nice to know there are people working on the interface, because you definitely need to know quite a bit about different functions with similar tasks. Would you know how Mathics compares to Maxima? Mathics' information is pretty sparse.
richardw 4y ago
I’d guess the end state is: tablet, stylus and convert scrawls into print-worthy output. Many pitfalls along the way I’m sure but nothing will beat just drawing what you mean.
anigbrowl 4y ago
Surprised nobody has made an app that lets you photograph/cut & paste formulae from books or web pages, or just write with a stylus. It's the layout with keyboard and mouse that's the stumbling block. There's lots of good options for symbolic logic, numeric analysis etc.
- munch117 4y ago
  You underestimate how hard the problem is. Things that in other fields would be minor typographical differences are often semantically meaningful in traditional math notation. Formula OCR would need to distinguish chi from x, lowercase delta from o with an overbar, a dot-product dot from a dot intended as multiplication, parentheses from brackets, v from the or sign. It needs to be able to determine whether your fraction "a / b / c" (by / I mean horizontal lines) was intended as "a / (b / c)" or "(a / b) / c" from the size of your letters, or from the relative widths of the fraction lines. Of course, anything a human can do, ML can learn to do eventually. Which invites the question: is reading arbitrary hand-written math actually something any human can do?

sterlind 4y ago

in Mathematica at least, you can use TraditionalForm to format your equations like maths. and what's more, you can edit things in that form without dropping out of it. you can also make palettes for commonly used symbols and such. it's not a magic blackboard, but with the symbolic nature of Mathematica and the rendering, it's kinda close.

TheRealPomax 4y ago
Indeed, so does this have that?

larryliu 4y ago

what about recognizing handwritten math? https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition https://mathpix.com/handwriting-recognition

hmottestad 4y ago

I agree. Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha are amazing because of how close they get to maths as it is taught in school, uni and through books. There are many other ways of working with maths. Graphing calculators are very common, and some models even have proper algebra support. There are also the likes of Matlab, R, Python + numpy, and obviously the addition of Jupyter notebooks. “Mathematica®-compatible syntax and functions” seems to be the main selling point of Mathics. I presume that this means that I can copy-paste Mathematica examples I find online or that are shared with my by someone else.

loa_in_ 4y ago

A simplistic but nice application for Android I found looking for this after reading parent's comment. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.mathlab.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=us.mathlab.and... (Adware/Non-free/closed source)

navane 4y ago

The industry standard (in my industry) software to do that is MathCad, of which version 15 is the peak release. Although not maintained anymore, it is still used a lot today. Because it is not maintained anymore, it doesn't change and has been the same for the past ~15 years. A free, still maintained, alternative of that is smathhttps://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary https://en.smath.com/view/SMathStudio/summary, which also has a cloud option.

jopsen 4y ago
Oh, I miss MathCad, I wish we had a decent FOSS clone.
- tikej 4y ago
  I find Julia’s Pluto to be reasonably close alternative. Of course it lacks many features, but plugins systems and overall architecture gives hope for possible extension to include many of the desired features.
phkahler 4y ago
Wait, Mathcad is unmaintained? What happened?
- theFco 4y ago
  It became Mathcad Prime that is still maintained and had a release this year.
data_maan 4y ago
Which is your industry, if you don't mind me asking?
- navane 4y ago
  Civil engineering
benhurmarcel 4y ago

soegaard 4y ago

> my first question is "can I write, and see, maths as actual maths instead of as programming statement?" What would that look like? Do you have a hypothetical example?

dagw 4y ago
I suspect they mean they want something like this: https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ymrym.png https://i.stack.imgur.com/Ymrym.png As opposed to something like def f(x,k) = Sum(k,math.inf, (math.pi*pow(sqrt(x),k))*sin(2*theta*(sqrt(...
- krsrhe 4y ago

hdjjhhvvhga 4y ago

> So... can I write, and see, maths as actual maths? Sorry to be nitpicking, but it seems you conflate "actual maths" with "maths notation we're accustomed to (since the 19 century)". As to what "actual maths" really is, it's an extremely interesting question that belongs to the philosophy of mathematics (mostly).

aflag 4y ago
That's indeed a bit of a nitpick. If you're working with maths, going back to your notes and reading them is really important. If your notes look like Sum(k,math.inf, (math.pipow(sqrt(x),k))...)), it's really not great. So, while you're correct that it's just notation, the issue remains that it's much harder to read maths in ascii.
TheRealPomax 4y ago
That's not a conflation, that is using the word "actual" correctly. Amusingly, the one thing that the word "actual" does not permit is leading the conversation to that "extremely interesting question": the word "actual" forces an interlocutor to consider only those contexts in which the thing in question is a real, existing thing. "Actual" is a no-hypotheticals-or-philosophical-ponderings zone =) In this case, that real thing would be modern maths notations. So this is kind of artificial nitpicking: English is not a zero-context language, you are still required and expected to understand the context words are used in based on understanding that they wouldn't make a lot of sense in other -even related- contexts. Of course, if I'd been glib and said this: > So... can I write, and see, maths? Then the insinuation that maths and programming are mutually exclusive concepts should definitely lead to a philosophical discussion.
- graphpapa 4y ago
  I think you’ve just each used a different sense of the word ‘actual’. Sense 1) “‘Actual’ mathematics does not consist in notational embodiments” ‘Actual’ as in essence rather than appearance, territory rather than map. Implies platonic reality of an eternal ephemeral mathematics. Conceived of as beyond and beneath all the particulars of any given representation. Sense 2) “‘Actual’ mathematics consists in notational embodiments” ‘Actual’ as in embodied. Material. That ‘actual’ mathematics is the set of mathematics which has been ‘actually’ done. You describe the second sense as self evident but with mathematics in particular this is bound to cause trouble. The sense ‘actual as in essence’ is perfectly reasonable and has a particular affinity to a discussion of mathematics. I find it hard to even write the description of the second sense without tying some linguistic knot. If ‘actual’ mathematics is its embodiments, what is the thing being embodied? Either the notation embodies nothing (what does it mean to describe the characteristics of a thing which doesn’t exist?) or if it does refer to something then according to the designation of embodied mathematics as ‘material’ then it embodies something which exists immaterially. So either mathematics describes the characteristics of a non existing thing, or a thing which exists, but exists immaterially. If ‘actual’ mathematics is the materially existing embodied form of a separate immaterial thing, what is that thing? So that ‘Actual mathematics’ is the embodiment of a separate immaterial thing called ‘not actual mathematics’. I’m not trying to make a watertight argument here just trying to outline the course of thought that your assertions inflame. From another angle, what does it mean for something to ‘materially exist’ so that it can be considered ‘actual’. I think this concept so nebulous as to make impossible the patching up of all the holes a cursory investigation reveals. Personally I think the distinction between the two is the root of trouble here. In the sense that anything exists, it exists according to mathematics. The essence of material existence, to the extent that it can be specified, is a structure of formal relational principles. Such formal structures are the domain of mathematics. Of course ‘material existence’ is used and understood perfectly well in ordinary circumstances but when the topic at hand is “what counts as ‘actual’ mathematics?” it seems shaky ground to build a house.

Ciantic 4y ago

Desmos has open source library called MathQuill, which converts typed chars to mathematical representation similar to Mathematica. Sure there is some "programming statements" with some (La)TeX like syntax there, but so does Mathematica too. [1]: http://mathquill.com/ http://mathquill.com/

asoneth 4y ago

Reading these replies, it's surprising to me how many people think that constraining writing a linear sequence of fixed characters is somehow natural as opposed to a simplification made for cost and technical reasons by Gutenberg, typewriters, keyboards, and ASCII. Writing is more than this. Writers can arrange characters in 2d space to convey semantic relationships in equations or among words. You can have multiple degrees of emphasis and italics. You can get a sense of which parts of the equation or prose were written quickly and which were written slowly and carefully. Often it conveys a bit of personality. You can even include small drawings or sketches embedded within the text like Gallelo's illustration of Saturn's rings. I get that we have to strip out this kind of nuance for technical reasons, but claiming that writing ought to be constrained to only what can be represented in plain text feels like claiming that painting should be constrained to only what can be represented in a bitmap.

traverseda 4y ago
I have adhd, and personally I find it a lot easier to follow through "math" when it's step by step. When I can say "first this happens, than this". I'm sure part of it is a don't have a great toolbox to break problems down, but personally what you're describing sounds horrible. Like trying to read a book out of order.
User23 4y ago
I strongly agree that representing multidimensional structures with one dimensional strings is suboptimal. On the computing side I see this as an editor problem. It’s not hard to conceptualize some multidimensional editor, but evidently it is hard to build one that will overtake the traditional text editors and their not particularly more advanced IDE cousins. The closest such thing I’ve personally used was HyperCard. I think that for real progress in this area we’ll have to abandon the desire to keep editor and language separated.
bobbylarrybobby 4y ago
Edward Tufte, is that you?

User23 4y ago

What is “actual maths?”