Amen. Mathematical notation is optimized for symbol manipulation using a pen and paper, not communication of information. Even to us programmers, it's a slew o

Amen. Mathematical notation is optimized for symbol manipulation using a pen and paper, not communication of information. Even to us programmers, it's a slew of one-letter variable names that very rarely seem to have the same meaning. Furthermore, those single-letters are not from a character set that has been stuffed into our heads since we were 3 years old, so there's an amount of translation going on, similar to the process of learning a foreign language (hear spanish -> translation to english -> process thought -> generate response in english -> translate to spanish -> speak spanish vs. hear spanish -> process throughout -> speak spanish). Bret Victor's project seems to be attempting this a little bit: http://worrydream.com/KillMath/ http://worrydream.com/KillMath/