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Results for: "Maths notation is a shitty in-joke"

I often sit down to read a juicy looking Comp Sci paper and just end up surrendering in a kind of irritated inscient horror. Thankfully there is a web search box where I can type my angry proclamation and get links to snippets that at least let me know I'm not the only one..

Erik McClure: Mathematical Notation Is Awful: Today, a friend asked me for help figuring out how to calculate the standard deviation over a discrete probability distribution.. 

I am sick and tired of people complaining that nobody likes math when
they refuse to admit that mathematical notation sucks, and is a major
roadblock for many students. It is useful only for advanced mathematics
that take place in university graduate programs and research
laboratories. It's hard enough to teach people calculus, let alone
expose them to something useful like statistical analysis or matrix
algebra that is relevant in our modern world when the notation looks
like Greek and makes about as much sense as the English pronunciation
rules. We simply cannot introduce people to advanced math by writing a
bunch of incoherent equations on a whiteboard. We need to find a way to
separate the underlying mathematical concepts from the arcane scribbles we force students to deal with.

 also..

Mathematical symbols, their pronunciations, and what they denote: Does a comprehensive ordered list exist?

This brings up a pet peeve of mine -- the
introduction of seemingly arbitrary notation in a lot of papers (for an
especially egregious example look at any of Dwork's papers). Right now
I'm refereeing a very nice paper that gives me a headache every time I
read it -- because the authors introduce a torrent of arbitrary notation
on page 3 in a discursive form, and use that for the next 20 pages. 

and..

Mathematical notation fundamentally sucks. […] Mathematicians have
not been very careful about notation. […] Mathematical notation
is in fact an impressionistic natural language, which is thereby no good
for teaching elementary stuff. -- Gerald Jay Sussman: The Role of Programming

 ascii ftw.

Update - just saw this on twitter..

Upside of being a huge dork is that you never run out of variable names. …you do run out of people willing to put up with your shit, though.