this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2024
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I would have quit math if I had to do algebra with names instead of letters.
What OP is talking about is readability, so in a situation where you're taking your own notes and have your own set of defined symbols, full words aren't necessary.
I personally lost all interest in math because there are way too many opinionated or non-standard symbol definitions
That seems like a strange reason to quit math since most symbols are pretty well agreed upon, and maths has little to do with the actual notation either way.
I should've said "anything math-heavy," but even then, it seems like switching fields or applications of math requires understanding a new definition of the same symbols, and a lot of that could be avoided with words.
I mean, if you get into any real depth with math, you are going to reach a point where you can't use conveniently use words to describe the symbols being manipulated.
As an example for the math I am doing literally right now, I very much prefer using C^+^~R~ compared to "semi circular arc in the upper half of the complex plane with radius R", or M^+^(f(z)) which means "Maximum of the magnitude of the function f(z) over C^+^~R~", which if I were to write out in full, would just become a clusterfuck.
Also you still wouldn't be able to get rid of symbols because some symbols are placeholders and straight up don't have any meaning in natural language. This occurs often in physics as well, not just pure maths. For example, the laplace transform of any function is written as a variable of "s", but "s" doesn't have a clear meaning (at least as far as I know).