I agree with this. I'm currently reading John McCarthy's paper "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine" linked to in the a

I agree with this. I'm currently reading John McCarthy's paper "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine" linked to in the article, which I've been meaning to read. I don't have any real formal maths/computer science education so looping over would have been futile in many cases and Wikipedia, namely http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mathematical_symbols, has been an invaluable resource for me in understanding the paper (and other things in the past). Another example is partial recursive functions, which I didn't know the definition of. A quick Google/Wikipedia search helped here. I've found myself looping over once or twice to make sure I haven't missed anything and, if not, proceeded to search for definitions or further explanations. I'm not entirely sure if this approach would work for other papers such as the Turing ones, since I'm familiar with Lisp already, but it's working very well for the paper I mentioned earlier.