I think there are two aspects to this that you might not have considered. 1) If your contact with maths is simply reading a formula out of a book and implement

I think there are two aspects to this that you might not have considered. 1) If your contact with maths is simply reading a formula out of a book and implementing it then long variable names might be fine. If you are actually trying to do a calculation then long variable names are terrible on two fronts: firstly because they take so much longer to write out, secondly because the additional characters obscure the 'moving parts' of an equation. I'd much prefer looking at "a(b+c) = ab + ac" vs "first_variable * (second_variable + third_variable) = first_variable * second_variable + first_variable * third_variable" 2) I don't really understand what you mean by meaningful variable names. Perhaps if you are using mathematics to model a specific thing then they make sense: eg number_of_people = number_of_males + number_of_females. However, mathematics as a discipline isn't about modeling specific situations, there is no "mathematics for groups of people" for instance. Instead mathematics deals with manipulating abstract ideas - do abstract ideas really have meaningful names? If you do have some idea then perhaps you could explain how you would define a derivative with meaningful names? The best I can come up with is: derivative(some_function(variable)) = limit small_change approaches 0 (some_function(variable + small_change) - some_function(variable)) / small_change Does that really assist cognition more than the standard: f'(t) = lim h->0 (f(t+h)-f(t))/h ? btw, can you see from this example what I mean about the extra wordiness hiding the parts? (Maybe I've just used the standard notation for so long the words mess up my pattern matching.)