[Smaug123]

I'm certainly not saying that symbols are always bad. Rather, I am attempting to argue that the parent is false in asserting that "mathematician[s]… just wish it would be written with symbols so that they could know precisely what the book is trying to say". The Hausdorff space example is a good one: it's very easy to say what a Hausdorff space is, but if you have to spell it out formally then the definition is kind of big and ugly.