Re:Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)
by xigoi on Sunday February 09, 2025 @02:50AM
(#42989203)
How would you name the variables in the code to make it clearer?
Re:Tips for mathematical handwriting (2007)
by fujinghg on Sunday February 09, 2025 @04:22AM
(#42989518)
No they didn't use them because they ran out. You know nothing about mathematics clearly. There are conventions to keep it concise. Some definitions of simple things would be unreadable if you used longer names. Consider the quotient rule:
k'(x)=(g(x)f'(x)-f(x)g'(x))/(g(x)^2
quotient'(expression)=(left_expression(expression)right_expression'(expression)-right_expression(expression)left_expression'(expression))/(left_expression(expression)^2
Surprisingly I've just gone through the last 30 pages of mathematical work I've done and there's a couple of π in ∫ there and that's it.
The code is unclear because it has single-letter variables instead of names, exacerbated by being in Greek, which mathematicians reached for because they were using single-letter variables, and ran out of them, and weren't bold or imaginative enough to break from convention. Then they used up the best of the Greek letters too and moved on to things like Gothic. This is stupid.