[CJefferson]

I disagree. In maths, the main competition is Greek letters. Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I find many undergrads can't remember the Greek alphabet.

Sure, girl wearing hat might be a bad choice, but I think "simple emoji like tree, fire, snowflake (for example). Do a good job of replacing Greek letters.

Another place I use emoji, is for a set of Labella which should have no order. Mathematica a often say they are naming some things 1,2,3, but please forget the integers have arthmetic and ordering. If you use fire, tree, snowflake as the names, no-one assumes an ordering, or arithmetic.

[blackbear_]

> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma. I find many undergrads can't remember the Greek alphabet.

Not sure what is the problem here. Even without knowing Greek nor the Greek alphabet, its letters are sufficiently diverse and can be easily told apart.

I can understand emojis can make math more enciting for young children, but if high school+ people cannot get past foreign-looking Greek letters I doubt they would find the motivation to progress much further in understanding the concepts involved.

[CJefferson]

In undergrad lectures I constantly have students refering to "fork" or "curly n", or just misnaming different Greek letters (and, I find myself sometimes doing the same). The Greek is (to me) unnessary block to discussion.

[alexvoda]

And greek letters and emoji have the same issue of dificult type-ability, non-ASCII-ness, dificult printability and dificult displayability. Emoji only add color.

The real solution is normal multicharacter names.

[CJefferson]

I am happy for people to hate emoji, but I don't think non-ASCII-ness is a problem (lots of languages aren't in ASCII anywhere), and in general printing and displaying is easy -- it seems I can type emojis basically anywhere I can type anything else.

True, they don't display well in terminals, but I wouldn't not be willing to limit my maths to an ASCII monospaced terminal anyway, and that isn't how anyone writes or creates maths (unless they are typing LaTeX, in which case it will be nicely formatted anyway). I want super/sub scripts.

[alexvoda]

The reason I mentioned non-ASCII-ness is because top-parent mentioned them:

> Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021

[CJefferson]

I'm sorry, I don't buy any of those reasons.

emoji are perfectly usable by screen readers -- if we really wanted to help people with screen readers we would move on from unstructured terminal output and programs which just dump screens of data. You know that thing that sometimes happens when a program running in the background outputs to the terminal -- that REALLY messes up screen readers.

[goto11]

> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma.

Are you saying kids will not be able to distinguish between the two symbols? I highly doubt that. They may not remember the names of the symbols, but emojis have the same problem.

[CJefferson]

Sorry, yes I mean they won't know how to say them out loud, which makes discussion hard, whereas they will know snowflake or fire.

Heck, I teach graph theory and I keep forgetting the damn names mid-lecture.

[alexvoda]

Yes. You have to memorize the mapping between the meaning and arbitrary Greek letters whereas the meaning is more obvious with emoji. But both (greek letters, emoji) are bad solutions to a very stupid problem math has. See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25207527

[yorwba]

> Kids today arent going to know their eta from their gamma.

I was inclined to agree with you, but then I remembered the zodiac sign emoji. Capricorn is basically η with a looped tail and taurus is gamma ɣ with a bigger loop. I'm pretty sure kids wouldn't be able to write them by hand (neither would I), but they have the advantage that if you type their names on a phone keyboard, you just need to recognize the symbol and tap it. Maybe all that's needed for Greek letters to compete with emoji is equal treatment by keyboards.