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by seanhunter
1016 days ago
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As someone who is currently on a path to self-study maths I understand what you're saying and sympathise. This is my predicament at the moment to a certain extent. And of course it all depends heavily on context- In the context of \frac{\sum^n x_i}{n}, i isn't the imaginary unit, it's the looping variable over the elements of x so we can compute the average, and everyone just knows (or is expected to), just like r^2 means the square of some variable r, or the extent to which one variable is explained by another in a regression etc whereas R^2 means a two-dimensional space over the real numbers. That said, I think and hope that I may in the future feel differently as my skills improve. My theory is that if everyone always added in that foundational knowledge to each paper etc it would make everything really verbose and make trying to get to the point of what you're saying a real slog for the author and the experienced practitioners. Being able to be consise means you get to the heart of the new stuff quickly without having to slog through a bunch of "C is the set of complex numbers a+bi where a and b are in R and i^2 = -1" first. |
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Except once someone did that, you could literally just cite their paper or book.