My papers regularly contain a combination of Fraktur, Hebrew, and Greek, as well as symbols only used by mathematicians. Careful notation choice, which often includes deliberately introducing such alphabets, makes the mathematics more readable, not less so.
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I understand that putting the symbols next to each other reduces the chance of an error occurring, but mathematical formulas rarely if ever have legends to make them more accessible to non-experts, like chemistry formulas or maps do.
Which matters when a populace goes through an education regime with dominant memes like âsome people just arenât good at / canât do mathâ which is frequently maintained by less than ethical gatekeepers which should be doing their best to guide students toward success but all too often are coerced into being agents reporting against various studentsâ ill behavior, which is often reflective of a socio-economic situation on the studentâs behalf.
This all leads to the world of math expertise having roughly similar demographics as Newton and Leibniz themselves, which has helped fuel income inequality due to a Stalin-like attack on the viability of studying humanities as a career and steadily rising fees for attendance. Hopefully things like Kahn Academy and legislation to make higher education more affordable will ameliorate this somewhat, but math education today keeps the vast majority of people from interpreting formulas that take no qualm in their obscurity.
Iâm not trying to say the notation is inconsistent, but I am saying the majority of people arenât able to receive the visual communication as intended and that makes me sad.
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Why would you want to rend your content?
What, that wasnât clear?
To rend your content would be to merely cleave it in twain. Surely you meant to render your content, breaking down the text until every last morsel of wisdom has been extracted, leaving the reader with a rich melange with which they could possibly feed their cat.
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If unaccountably unfathomable, has the meaning not been rent, wrung, and wrested from its rightful role?
Meaning is not confined to one Situationist spectacle, one soporific symposium. Masqued alternately as Pierrot and Columbine, she takes pleasure in the ribbed, the razzed and the ridiculed, indifferent to clime or demesne, inattentive to position or speed.
I just found this thing:
http://www.expresso-app.org/
that does analysis of text for readability and highlights potential problems (including using words not in the 5000 most common). Fairly entertaining to past in things Iâve written and see the heaps of warnings, and would be far less annoying than an editor that prevents input.
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This is certainly not the reason notation is chosen, and not the goal of mathematical exposition.
[quote=âpeemlives, post:64, topic:76243â]
mathematical formulas rarely if ever have legends to make them more accessible to non-experts[/quote]
On the contrary, most mathematical papers start with a pointer to required background, and if new notation or terminology is used in the paper it is introduced plainly right upfront.
What is true is that most mathematics is not accessible to someone without the relevant lower-level training, and some very elementary mathematics like calculus and differential equations are simply assumed, just as in any academic field one would assume the basic language of the field.
[quote=âpeemlives, post:64, topic:76243â]
This all leads to the world of math expertise having roughly similar demographics as Newton and Leibniz themselves, which has helped fuel income inequality[/quote]
If you think that mathematics departments are heavily dominated by white Anglo-Saxons, you havenât been in one since the 1960s. The reason so many people not from dominant cultures do so well in mathematics is that it doesnât require a lot of money or equipment, just a cultural tradition of focus and study and access to paper or a blackboard.
[quote=âpeemlives, post:64, topic:76243â]
today keeps the vast majority of people from interpreting formulas that take no qualm in their obscurity[/quote]
I canât speak for whether the formulas want themselves to be obscure (perhaps channeling Greta Garbo), but Iâve never met a mathematician who is not a strong advocate for expositional clarity. You seem to have had an experience which has caused you to imagine a world of âless than ethical gatekeepersâ with an objective of keeping people down, and I am sorry for that, but it is not representative of the desires of modern mathematics educators, and hasnât been in my (considerable) lifetime.
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I wish we all had the opportunities S. Wolfram has enjoyed, but consider what Ramanujan had in common with the aforementioned group (it isnât ethnicity).
You mean immigrant refugee parents?
Ever wonder why there is no âValmiki tau functionâ?
Also
In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani became the first woman as well as the first Iranian, Artur Avila the first South American and Manjul Bhargava the first person of Indian origins to win the Fields Medal.
Yeah so anyone with the faculty to reason. And until recently of certain gender and continental origin. We wouldnât be able to enjoy the meritocracy we all thrive on without this level playing field.
Youâve shifted the goalposts. The historical question of whether and why mathematics (really all of academics) was dominated by Europeans, the more recent question of why underrepresentation by some groups remains, are interesting questions, However, these are questions which I am not interested in discussing with a random person at this time and in this venue.
I initially posted here in response to your bizarre suggestion that somehow mathematical notation was the cause of the situation, that mathematical formulas are intentionally made hard to understand for people who arenât white male Europeans. I donât know what in your background led you to make this statement, but Iâve spent pretty much every day of the last 35+ years thinking about mathematics, mathematical exposition, and mathematical pedagogy, and I will tell you that you are simply wrong. Not even slightly not-wrong. Moreover, the idea that some of this notation is intrinsically inaccessible to people from non-European cultures is frankly racist.
There are demographic inequities in all STEM fields, and while considerable effort is being made in my country to right them it is probably not enough. However, that is a different issue as to whether mathematical formulas are themselves part of the problem. In fact, it is the relative absence of such cultural content from mathematical formulas that has led to mathematics in the US and Britain being so attractive to the children and grandchildren of immigrants.
By the way, there have been non-white Fields medalists going back to the 1950s. Not that that this award is in any way a good measure of STEM diversity.
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I was trying to make a point about it being arbitrary and not necessarily the best way to do things, like how pemdas is much more popular than polish notation, but not more or less correct, and the goalposts got dragged until you refused to acknowledge that a woman wasnât granted the Fields medal until 2014 and hey maybe that suggests some cultural problems but what do I know?
I never did this, but if you want to have an argument with an imaginary opponent who believes that academics has overcome centuries of cultural and gender diversity issues be my guest, I will watch quietly from the sidelines.
Hey itâs the internet, people are entitled to argue against whatever they imagine is important.
What text editors do you like, by the way? (attempting to get back to the initial topic.)
LaTeX. It is pretty much the standard for mathematics.
Oh, I thought LaTeX and TeX are more typesetting languages that are editor naive. I personally like vi / vim and emacs but if itâs available I really like an editor called joe that can be invoked in a way that gives it a wordstar like interface thatâs easier than working in emacsâ wordstar-mode. Iâve heard good things about spacemacs but I havenât had much need to use a text editor lately. I also want to try acme and sam some time but they are much older.
This is correct. I use it on so many platforms with so many editors that the easy answer is just LaTeX. Most of the things I use the editor itself for are so generic that the commands are the same on all of them. (Older Unix editors like vi, emacs, etc are different, but I donât use them anymore.)
Some distributions, such as MikTeX, come with a selection of free editors/editing environments that are highly integrated to LaTeX. In Windows I tend to most often use a commercial one, WinEdt, just because I bought it at some point then got used to it.
