this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2023
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For real, though, I wish maths in general, in all fields, adopted the way things are written in programming.
So, instead of something like:
Just write it out:
And I mean, that's still a harmless formula. I've had to learn so many formulas, where not the formulas were the problem, rather it was knowing what φ means in this field/context. So many scientific papers are just extremely hard to read for anyone from a different field, because the formulas are obfuscated like that.
And the thing is, I get that pure mathematicians don't care. Their formula inputs usually truly don't have much of a meaning beyond
aandb.But their conventions, in particular multiplication being implied when two random letters are written next to each other, that just fucks up the option for anyone in any other field to use legible variable names.
You're absolutely correct, and in my experience authors with physics background are even worse.
I've seen algorithms that I know by heart, understand fully and have implemented tens of times represented in such a way that I can't even recognise them.
"So many papers are extremely hard to read because the formulas are obfuscated like that"
This isn't really an issue though, of you don't have enough foundational knowledge to understand what the formula means or how it could be conceivably derived, does knowing how it's calculated matter?
I do think so, yes.
For one, not everyone needs to be an absolute expert. You do want some person with expert knowledge to sanity check what you're doing, but ultimately you'll have engineers, programmers etc. that are tasked with putting a formula into reality. If they can intuitively read formulas and more easily read up on the surrounding context, that helps a lot.
In that sense, I may also be very programmer-biased in how I read papers, but generally I prefer to look at a given formula and then read up on why it is formulated like that. Maybe I also have some form of ADS, but for the life of me, I cannot linearly read a paper front to back. And I'm not alone in that.
From computer science papers / academic texts, I know that this method of reading works perfectly fine. But if I try to delve into any other fields, it's always a matter of first decoding the formula before I can try to figure out what it means.
Ultimately, it just feels like unnecessary hindrance of understanding, even if theoretically you're just hindering those who supposedly wouldn't understand anyways.
"From computer science papers/academic texts I know this method of reading works perfectly"
This is almost certainly due to pure familiarity. CS papers are just as indecipherable to unfamiliar persons. Possibly even more since things like complexity are heavily used, without any explanation of what it is. Data structures are another common one that the vast majority of non-CS people would not understand when referenced.
I know because this is exactly how I felt coming from an intermediate mathematics background.