[jonrx]

This makes me weirdly happy to see on hacker news. :)

Actual notation was the reason I got deep into LaTeX during my undergrad degree (actuarial science). I don't recall the library I used at the time, but if I were to re-do it today, I'd use this one: https://vigou3.gitlab.io/actuarialsymbol/. Vincent Goulet (from Laval University in Quebec) has done a lot to bring actuaries into open source and free software.

Once you internalize the notation (you have to for actuarial exams), it's actually quite powerful. Even though I have not practised in half a decade, I still am able to read 90% of the symbols and get the underlying mathematical formula.

It also makes a tremendous amount of sense when you use it in the context of a mortality table (see https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/47/Excerpt_... as an example).