i think i would have learned math easier if my teachers had stopped telling me that “we’re using [x, Δ, α] for our variable here but it can be anything!” and let me know that there are actual conventions for which symbols are used

@rowan but what about

@rowan Yea, a lot of notation is rooted in something, but good luck figuring out the system. What has one got to do, write a paper and get peer reviewers to tell us what we should have written?

@monoidmusician hey i know that one !!!!

@fargate yeah, it makes sense that the conventions are probably pretty loosely followed, but i’m even thinking of like um… early linear algebra and really common symbols like t for time and α for angle/coefficient. it removes some of the cognitive load (at least for me) and adds a bit of context to the big string of character soup, i think

i’m sure it gets a lot less well-defined once one strays from early levels of math though

@rowan It's certainly been an adventure in algorithm analysis and axiomatic set theory. Mathematical logic was clean enough, and then I somehow could no longer read it when starting on more advanced courses with a different lecturer.

fox that had a 5th grade understanding of math as it entered college

@rowan math is just programming in a really esoteric language with lots of unicode and magic numbers, almost nonexistent documentation, and every variable is one character long. so it’s like trying to decipher the average StackOverflow “managed to do it in one line” answer except there’s more than one line. how could something like that not be simple and easy to learn? (joking)

@kasdeya oh! so math is the final stage of code golfing, got it!