research!rsc: The Hideous Name
That last sentence made an impression on me.
Holy crap. I don’t think I’ve taken a single university-level mathematics course (eight, so far, which I feel impresses my friends in the humanities), where I have not begrudged the adopted notation set.
After a while, you get a feel for the common ground in every discipline, i.e. letters j-n are always integers, a-d are often constants, a primed variable A’ is usually a change on whatever A used to be, and so on. Of course, every different sub discipline often requires its own notation, and very textbook author and every professor has his or her own preferred notation that may or may not vary from most other people’s.
This is frustrating to me because ever since I managed to grok programming and the basics of computation, I feel like I fundamentally understand written formulas. I mean, it’s just a series of steps you apply to values, right? (Not quite, but anyways).
So what’s stopping everyone from using meaningful names for the special sets, and variables and so on, and maybe even, god forbid, syntax highlighting? I’m of the opinion I might’ve understood most precalculus and most logics better, and maybe even done well in physics, if only we improved the notation a bit.
Ultimately, the real problem is that I never study very well, but I’m keen to blame the parts that I’m not in control of.
