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by Olreich
1364 days ago
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If you go watch math lectures, there's a bunch of "x means Puppy Constant" or, "let's substitute in k for the Real component", or "let's signify <CONCEPT> by collecting these terms into a variable". My argument wouldn't be to replace ALL the variables with meaningful names, just the ones with a lot of meaning that a reader might not understand. It'd also be great if constants, variables, and functions all got naming conventions. Lowercase letters are variables, all caps for constants, etc. It saves a little bit on writing to shorten the variable names, but if the goal of math is to share and spread knowledge within the community or without, better naming and less-memorization would both help. You can also rename things for the working out and use friendlier names for the final equations, just tell people how you're renaming them and everyone will follow along and the programmers will stop trying to sell you one readable code. Most importantly the flat dismissal and horror that many express when someone brings up adjusting the symbolic traditions of Maths should be investigated. Engage with why you feel so strongly that anything other than rigid adherence to tradition is sacrilege. Based on what I've heard, in order to be a great Mathematician, you need to hold onto tradition lightly and think outside the box. Rigid adherence to tradition doesn't sound like that to me. |
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Who’s saying that? Inventing good notation is a big part of mathematics (and that also frequently gets criticized on HN because it may introduce ambiguities)
Also, there’s nothing wrong with texts that target an audience with a certain level of understanding.
It’s not as if adding, for example, “By Hermetian matrix we mean a complex square matrix that is equal to its own conjugate transpose” will make a paper much easier to understand, just as adding a comment “this is where the program starts running” doesn’t help much in understanding your average C program, or adding a definition of “monarchy” to a history paper.
In the end, any scientific paper has to be read critically, and that means making a serious effort in understanding it. A history paper, for example, may claim that Foo wrote “bar” but implied “baz”. A critical reader will have read thousands of pages, and (especially if they disagree with the claim) then think about that for a while, and may even walk to their bookshelf or the library to consult other sources before continuing reading.