alt Hacker NewsNo, the problem with mathematics is that it is basically its own language separate from your native tongue. You have to learn dozens of symbols and greek letters and such and memorize what their meaning is in the context of mathematics in order to "follow" a mathematical conversation.
Mathematics would be much more approachable if it just used plain English like `sum(0, Infinity, my_func)` instead of a big Greek sigma with nested function nomenclature. But on the flip side, mathematics being its own language means that a mathematician from any country can read and understand mathematics from a different country without needing to translate words such as "sum" and "infinity"
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Your translation only makes intuitive sense to you because you are well versed in programming.
I suspect if I showed a non-technical person with no background in either math or programming they would think both are nonsense until you explained it to them
Capital sigma doesn't always mean sum and certainly lowercase sigma never means sum.
If mathematics used plain language, the ability to meaningfully manipulate and understand would go way down. Proofs would become massively tedius.
Of course, notation is hard. Any good mathematician should put a lot of work into it.
Mathematics would be much more approachable if it just used plain English like `sum(0, Infinity, my_func)` instead of a big Greek sigma with nested function nomenclature
First of all, no, mathematics would be far less approachable if it did that. Most of the Greek letters used in mathematics don't have a universal meaning, they're context-specific and defined by convention or just prior to use.
Second of all, mathematics is optimized for hand calculation on paper, not long-term programming and code maintenance. Writing out long names over and over on a whiteboard gets tiring extremely quickly, so mathematicians prefer to stick to single-letter symbols.