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Re:A Zero-Math Introduction to Markov Chain Monte Carlo Methods by yorwba on Saturday December 23, 2017 @12:15AM (#15993039)
Every discipline has the problem that it's jargon is impenetrable to outsiders. Try showing someone with zero programming knowledge a text talking about "string search" and "pointer chasing" and they will be just as confused.

Mathematics is only different because it is useful in many other fields, so you get lots of non-mathematicians trying to make use of some result in isolation. When they don't understand the explanation, they blame it on the unfamiliar words and notation, but often that's just a symptom of not understanding the concepts. Anecdote: I have been taking a course taught in Chinese, which I don't speak very well, so all mathematical jargon is new to me. But just seeing how they were used let me recognize the words for familiar mathematical concepts.

Of course some mathematical writing is just bad, but usually mathematicians will then agree that it's bad. But if some formula comes with an explanation using words you don't understand, there is no way around looking up definitions until you understand the prerequisites. There is no language you could translate mathematics into to make it magically more understandable, unless the translation always prepends an introductory textbook.

I don't think it's heretical to long for better notation, I just don't think it's going to help much. But everyone is free to make up their own symbols, so feel free to go ahead. If it's really better, people will adopt it, just as they adopted superscripts for powers instead of one-off symbols, Leibniz notation instead of Newton's, and so on.

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