[squiggleblaz]

tldr (or boring)? skip to the last pragraph.

"the product of pi and the square of r" is no less clear than the mathematical transcription of it.

3245 is perhaps English, but there's nothing wrong with "three thousand, two hundred and forty-five".

Some more examples taken from Wikipedia:

The sum of zero and zero. Five less than the product of eight and some value. Seven times the square of some value plus four times the aforesaid value minus ten.

I mean I could go on; these are either not ambiguous, or they're ambiguous only because of a lack of convention.

We don't do it because our attention span doesn't last long enough. We need to keep looking back at what we've already read to really understand what we're reading. Mathematical formulae give us the ability to do that quickly, since the graphical, multidimensional concise layout quickly allows us to find the place we're looking for.