[adzm]

On a related tangent, when I was teaching my younger kids about math and helping with homework, I would often rewrite things as a formula, or rewrite the formula itself once they got to that point. However instead of things like x I would use things like fluffy cloud, star, etc. They thought it was annoying but it still kept them interested and have said they've done the same when helping their peers. It's easy to forget what it was like learning these abstractions, and it was important to show that x was nothing special, it could be a sun, it could be the phrase "total number of kittens"

[somat]

> it could be the phrase "total number of kittens"

There is this minimalism present in math culture, while I sort of understand it, when tossing and mixing formulas it helps to have everything as small as possible. but later, when it is published it really sucks for readability, "Okay here is an item doing some heavy lifting in this formula what is it for? hell if I know some joker labeled it 'φ' "

I like to joke, If you think programmers are bad at naming thing you should see the mathematicians, they take a perverse pride in their inability to name things.

The worst are programs derived directly from a math paper, if your variable holds the correlation coefficient call it that. we have thousands of years of language and labels we can use to share our ideas with others. don't encrypt it and call it "rho".

[JdeBP]

One "fun" aspect to this is that there's not just 1 but 13 extra copies of the English alphabet in Unicode that are there specifically for mathematicians to name stuff in formulae and equations.

And with the exceptions of Fraktur and script, free fonts that are already sans-serif and monospace generally do not make the glyphs visually distinct from the actual English alphabet characters similarly weighted and slanted.

Which gives the sighted people a taste of what the sight-impaired people have to suffer when people abuse these code points as ways to write in italics or boldface, because the screen readers correctly obey the important note in Unicode Technical Report 25 that these letters do not combine to make words, and read them out as mathematical formulae where "d" is multiplied by "o" and then by "g".

[BeFlatXIII]

> don't encrypt it and call it "rho".

These programmers were not hazed enough in their fraternity days. It was not drilled into them that p is rho and that rho is p. Whichever one they choose was always wrong and punished with pushups.