"Secundus, after acknowledging the insanely annoying tendency of math papers to make up their own notation without ever defining it" "The math case is hard bec

"Secundus, after acknowledging the insanely annoying tendency of math papers to make up their own notation without ever defining it" "The math case is hard because someone failed to tell you what you need to know, and no one wrote it down anywhere." I agree with a lot of what you're saying but I don't agree with these two assertions. I'm working developer and have been for 6 years (Ruby, JavaScript). About a year ago I wanted to learn a bit more about how math (logic in particular) gets used to prove interesting things about programming languages. It was a very short search for books/material on the subject that were approachable for me and contained plenty of fully explained notation (eg, inference rules in Pierce's Types and Programming Languages). After convincing myself the math was nothing to be afraid of, approaching papers was difficult but not at all impossible. It really boiled down to putting in the time to fill in the gaps in my knowledge through reading referenced papers and taking notes. I have yet to come across a paper that does not provide, through references or explicit notation semantics, all the information necessary to understand the content. Is doing the reference reading easy? No, it's very time consuming. That doesn't mean that these papers are deliberately evasive in their definitions. [edit] If it's not clear I'm reading CS papers mostly to do with type theory. It may be that things are very different for pure mathematics papers.