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A comment on Terry Tao on some desirable properties of mathematical notation. Parent comment

Re:Terry Tao on some desirable properties of mathematical no... by JadeNB on Tuesday July 21, 2020 @09:37PM (#23913058)
> There's no better choice of symbols or names that will help you understand Galois theory. You simply need to understand high-school algebra, then group theory, then Galois theory.

This probably isn't completely true—as will be clear to anyone, even a subject expert, who tries to go back and read the original papers. At least part of this is due to fads in notation—in my field, I can easily read the papers of people who do similar work to mine, and struggle with the papers of those who don't, even when they're talking about exactly the same thing—but some of it must be due to genuine improvement.

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Re:Terry Tao on some desirable properties of mathematical no... by quantdev on Wednesday July 22, 2020 @10:44AM (#23917550)
Yes, you're right. I should have said, there's no better choice of symbols that will remove the huge set of prerequisites you need to first understand. There isn't as large of a tower of abstractions to understand most codebases.
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