My biggest problem with the way math is done is the insistence on using single letter names with at most some indices. How many good programmers would agree tha

My biggest problem with the way math is done is the insistence on using single letter names with at most some indices. How many good programmers would agree that naming variables and functions with only one letter is a good idea? The sad part is that this infiltrated all other fields related to mathematics. You can not even imagine how much did teachers annoy me in high school when all variables in Pascal(back then this was still the language that was thought) programs were named with one letter (I started programing when I was in elementary school) . I believe this is caused by the symbol-less notation of the multiplication operator. Since xy actually means x*y there is no way to have words as names. A side problem caused by this is the overloading of the symbol-less operator to mean something else in the case of mixed numerals ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraction_(mathematics)#Mixed_numbers http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraction_(mathematics)#Mixed_nu... ). Thankfully, where I am from, this notation is only used in middle school. But this caused a lot of problems when I was helping siblings with homework since I was no longer used to that notation. Oh, also, Tau is better than Pi ( http://www.tauday.com/ http://www.tauday.com/ ).