It has always been tolerated in math. The more unpronouncable the Greek letter, the better. If you want to sound really badass, you start using Hebrew letters a

It has always been tolerated in math. The more unpronouncable the Greek letter, the better. If you want to sound really badass, you start using Hebrew letters as well. The pinnacle of badassness is multiple capital Pi and capital Sigma with some set notation below instead of indexes laid out clearly like a for loop. Or "Einstein notation" where you stop writing the summation symbol because a small group of people think it is implied, which helps gatekeep others from the field of research because they can't make sense of your equations anymore. At that point, people give up on reviewing your paper and just publish the damn thing because you're from Google, Stanford, or wherever. If mathematicians worked like software engineers they'd label things like "density[x, y]" instead of "\rho_{xy}" or at least stop using PDFs and use HTML with a tooltip over each variable name like we have in pretty much every modern editor, but we all know they hate readability.