> “The proof is trivial.” This is the mathematician’s version of piping output to /dev/null. Heh heh. Never thought about it like that. Amazing write-up, btw.

> “The proof is trivial.” This is the mathematician’s version of piping output to /dev/null. Heh heh. Never thought about it like that. Amazing write-up, btw. As somebody who dabbled in both CS & Math, I'd say the cultures are vastly different. You can spend years, decades even, just teaching undergrad calc courses while having barely 1-2 papers to your name, and yet you'd be considered a legitimate mathematician & get paid & all that. I know scores of math professors who are in that category. With CS, if you don't have productive output in a week, you are just idling & companies will fire you. CS academia isn't a whole lot different...the paper output is a lot more, though much of it is backed by programatic machinery. As a consequence, a standardized notation/syntax has developed out of sheer pragmatic necessity. Everybody knows what you mean when you say its a hash, or a bst, or an lfsr, or a trie or a monad ( you wish :) Well atleast some of these are standard concepts across all pgmming languages. With math, you can labor for years in some obscure field ( heh heh a mathematician will kill for that pun!) in which less than ten people know what you mean. At a conference, Hilbert was supposed to have gotten up and asked a speaker "What do you mean by a Hilbert space?". That should tell you something. The syntax is remarkably nonstandard & even simple things like edges, nodes, edge weight, graph correspondingly become arcs, vertices, payload, network depending on where the literature originates from. When I studied a few math papers in grad school, I had a lurking suspicion the author was going out of his way to obscure his thought process & result. With CS papers, you atleast get straightforward pseudocode & you can run off to your favorite language whether php or haskell & give it a shot. There are math texts out there where you pick up one of them, you feel like a complete fool, you pick up the other, you instantly get the point, and they are both talking about the same exact thing !! artin vs dummit & foote vs herstein comes to mind...i got 1000% more out of herstein than the other two. I agree with the author that in the absence of standard math terminology, I'm afraid programers struggling to learn advanced math just learn bits & pieces necessary to get their job done & move back to fighting their daily battles with git rebase & jira tickets.