Rare Greek Variables

Re:Rare Greek Variables by forrestthewoods on Sunday November 28, 2021 @05:12AM (#29367723)

In college I had a physics professor who sometimes replace single-letter variables like X with pictograms like a football. It was a nice reminder that the symbol is completely arbitrary and meaningless.

Therefore I semi-jokingly propose math papers use emoji for their symbols.

I more seriously propose, every math paper should include a god damn table of symbol definitions. I never got “good at math” because not only is the symbology dense, it’s incredibly hard to find definitions. I’m pretty good at teaching myself new things from books and papers. But I just can’t grok math. Math on Wikipedia is a nightmare. It makes me sad because it’s unnecessary. It doesn’t actually have to be so hard.

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Re:Rare Greek Variables by tragomaskhalos on Sunday November 28, 2021 @06:58AM (#29368198)

My son is rather algebra-phobic, so to explain concepts requiring variables I usually use a coloured dot or (if no coloured pens are are to hand) a little picture. People who grok maths tend to be blind to the confusion that variables can engender, viz if I say "2x = 6" then "x" is to be understood as representing a specific value, which is in contrast to e.g. an area formula like "A = bh", so breaking away from letters altogether is sometimes helpful.

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