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The reason for using different scripts (Greek etc.) is to sort symbols by broad categories. Done right, it actually makes things more readable (to the sophisti
by xamuel 12y ago
The reason for using different scripts (Greek etc.) is to sort symbols by broad categories. Done right, it actually makes things more readable (to the sophisticated reader, which is the mathematician's target audience anyway). It's almost like an implicit type system: (within a particular context) Greek letters mean ordinals, lowercase Roman letters mean predicate logic variables, uppercase German letters mean universes... It would be much less fun, and much harder, to follow an intense mathematical work if the variables were all in the same font.
- bsdetector 12y agoYes that's the pre-computer I was talking about. Sophisticated mathematicians should be concerned about if it is machine readable or not. If it's machine readable then you can use whatever font, color, or any other style you want that helps you to read it. The viewer can abbreviate descriptive names to single glyphs if you want. Programming is much less fun, and harder to follow, without syntax highlighting. But it doesn't follow that we should manually be color coding syntax and variables, or that integers should always be blue. That's essentially the case with the "readability" of mathematics.
- SixSigma 12y ago> Programming is much less fun, and harder to follow, without syntax highlighting. That's your opinion.
- spc476 12y agoThen there's Color Forth, where color is used as syntax (http://www.colorforth.com/cf.htm http://www.colorforth.com/cf.htm).
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y agoWhy? I write mathematics to share with mathematicians, not machines. Would you ask a poet to make the same sacrifice for machine comprehension?
- sukilot 12y agoA poem can mean whatever any reader wants it to. In math objective truth matters.
- Q6T46nT668w6i3m 12y ago> A poem can mean whatever any reader wants it to. In math objective truth matters. Maybe? Penelope Maddy, et al, have convinced me that this isn’t as clear as we’d like: http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~pjmaddy/bio/DualistVol15_Maddy.pdf http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~pjmaddy/bio/DualistVol15_Maddy.pd...
- im3w1l 12y ago>Greek letters mean ordinals... mean universes Maybe in your particular subfield. When I think of epsilon or delta I think of a small number. Capital Delta is a difference. Capital Gamma is the gamma function. lambda is a wavelength. pi is a constant. theta is an angle. a,b,c denote known constants. x,y,z denote variables to solve for. k,n,m denotes integers. i is the imaginary unit. f is a function. y is a function depending on x. Y is the integral(which in this context has nothing to do with integers)/laplace transform/fourier transform of y.