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ben_wyesterday at 6:41 PM4 repliesview on HN

Aye.

A decade or so ago I wondered if the reason maths was hard was the names being optimised for writing by hand. Everything's single letters if they can get away with it, so when mathematicians run out of Latin alphabet, they use Greek, bold, etc.

Even integration's ∫ is a fancy elongated s.

CS version would be e.g. integral(function=some_named_function, from=a, to=b, with_respect_to=argument_of_function), which may be longer, but is less opaque, especially when you get in so deep there's 3 other people in the world who've looked into this specific problem and you had to invent your own operations.

But that's all an outsider's perspective. I stopped with two A-levels in maths and further maths.


Replies

ndriscollyesterday at 8:30 PM

Nope, math notations are optimized for reading, not writing (consider that people still use symbols on computers despite it being quite a bit more tedious to type). The conciseness makes it easier for you to see structural patterns and do symbolic manipulation in your mind's eye. Even something basic like the wave equation would become completely illegible with an expanded notation like that.

Same reason why we write 5-3, not subtract(minuend=five, subtrahend=three).

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enedilyesterday at 6:50 PM

At some point though, the speed of reading/writing is limiting what you can understand. Think of "not fitting the needed formulas/theorems in cache".

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gowldyesterday at 7:35 PM

Look up "APL" and "J".

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cpillyesterday at 7:54 PM

yes! I really find when computer science ppl start using math notation to describe algorithm very pretentious. we have programming languages in comp sci, we don't need it!