[gbear605]

It’s not entirely impossible; mathematicians did it for thousands of years (just read Newton’s Principia). It does use very specific language to do so, and some of the language might not exist for some advanced mathematical concepts, but I think that this whole article could be written that way.

[jacobolus]

> mathematicians did it for thousands of years (just read Newton’s Principia)

What mathematicians did for thousands of years arose in a culture of oral proofs supplemented by prepared diagrams: Euclid's proofs were meant to be recited aloud in front of an audience while pointing at an image labeled only with single letters/numerals – not read in a book. The society was substantially illiterate, there was no access to paper or good pens, algebra had not yet been invented, and all arithmetic was done mentally or using fingers or physical tokens.

Compared to mathematical notation, natural language expressions are often incredibly large and cumbersome, can make following the argument extremely difficult, and make many kinds of symbolic manipulations all but impossible.

Providing a visual way to interpret and manipulate mathematical expressions was a revolution in mathematics without which most modern mathematics would never have appeared. Eliminating that is comparable to writing computer programs via punched cards because "that's how they used to do it".

[marcosdumay]

Yeah, let's talk about the difference in accessibility between the text on this site and Newton's Principia...

[mgunyho]

I think parent is referring here to the fact that math used to be written without symbols (other than numbers) up to the 1300s according to Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_mathematical_notati... (very interesting article!) However, I would say that there is a reason why notation tends towards terse symbols: it's much more efficient and unambiguous.

[SAI_Peregrinus]

Even Newton's Principia has symbols, they're just different. His notation used dots and lines & boxes in various positions.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notation_for_differentiation#N...

[psychoslave]

Maybe ctoth or some other user of screen reader might have a look at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Mathematical_Principles_o... and tell us how it goes.