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by OkayPhysicist 17 hours ago
Terseness is a significant advantage in pattern recognition. If you write a long, detailed breakdown of every step, not only are you spending a bunch of time writing, you're also obscuring the natural symmetries of the statement.

It's like saying "I never understood people who prefer to use functions instead of inlining everything". Adding a bunch of visual noise to a statement doesn't improve comprehension.
1 comments
smallmancontrov 15 hours ago
Yep. Does anyone think Cauchy's Integral Formula looks worse like this:

https://www.mathjax.org/

than like this?

    z = a + R * sp.exp(sp.I * t)
    
    f_at_a = 1 / (2 * sp.pi * sp.I) * sp.Integral(
        f(z) / (z - a) * sp.diff(z, t),
        (t, 0, 2 * sp.pi),
    )
The heiroglyphs let me offload some of the work to my vision system. It feels like there's some kind of hierarchical attention organization mechanism that works better in visual space. If I'm not pushing to "maximum math," both representations clear the hurdle of "good enough" (CIF does) but if I'm trying to chew through something genuinely gnarly I want all the help I can get.
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