3 ms·
I know programmers like to blame mathematicians for writing functions with lots of one letter variable names, but it's the physicists who insist on doing so wit
by shiandow 3y ago
I know programmers like to blame mathematicians for writing functions with lots of one letter variable names, but it's the physicists who insist on doing so without defining any of them.
You want to know what V is? It's clearly the potential, we've defined it six papers ago! Oh you were wondering what it's type was, well it's usually a scalar field. No, don't write the parameter as t that changes the whole meaning!
- Phiwise_ 3y agoSussman has a great guest lecture that mentions exactly these sorts of issues, and that he found it much easier to verify work he and his grad students did in mathematical physics after developing the "mechanics programming" notation he explains in Structure and Interpretarion of Classical Mechanics and Functional Differential Geometry.