Notices by VolatileDream (volatiledream@adulthood.lol)

@zens my bad, text is a lossy medium.

Do you know of any math journals that have proposed notation changes? It seems like something that must have happened before, at least to standardize on specific things.

@zens I think we might have different experiences with math & how easy the status quo is to read or write.

I find a lot of math notation needlessly terse to the point of being opaque. Maybe it's fine on a chalk board for yourself or during a lecture, but on slides or in a paper you should optimize for time spent reading and use more descriptive names.

I've seen so much abbreviated "f(x) = ..." when that function and variable would benefit from more descriptive names.

@zens I think that if you explicitly state you're using "long symbol names" or "explicit multiplication" (name tbd), then only the single symbols are taken (and possibly only in limited contexts), and the system allows for longer strings of symbols as a unique identifier.

So even if e is taken, "ee" is a different identifier, and doesn't represent "e*e".

Eg, some physics: "speed = distance / time" involves 3 unique identifiers.

This seems similar to math & variables in software to me.

@zens Can't we do this relatively trivially by requiring folks to explicitly multiply rather than it being implicit? We already do this for numbers, so why not symbols too?

eg: `xy != x*y`, just like `12 != 1*2`