Comment by klibertp

> nonstandard notation with no context or definition.

Which is exactly how the notation is used in many papers. You're supposed to have the context (from reading books and other papers in the area) and infer the definitions ("it's trivial to show, so we won't"). It's a passive-agressive stance from the perspective of someone not belonging to the club.

> “Divide the reduced Plank constant by twice the mass of the particle, then multiply by the second derivative, with respect to the x-coordinate, of the wave-function. To this quantity, add the potential multiplied by the wave-function. This is equal to the product of the energy eigenvalue and the wave-function.”

When I imagine this, I'm ecstatic. The difference between the two formulations is that the latter I can work my way through with a search engine, WolframAlpha, and Wikipedia, while I have no way - other then learn the whole subject matter - to decipher the former. I just don't understand what's wrong with the second formulation. From what I read, this was the standard way of writing about maths and physics until 17th century - at least. Yes, it's more characters, but it's infinitely more readable and discoverable to the uninitiated.

Not to mention, from the classes I attended, lecturers often say it out loud in exactly this form, while writing the symbols on a whiteboard. So it's obvious that the two are equivalent.

The former notations lends itself better to algebraic transformation, so I don't have any issues with using it for the intermediate steps, but the result - which is what I'm after, as a causal user and not a practitioner - could be presented in both forms. It would immediately unlock a lot of knowledge for use by non-experts. What's wrong with hoping for that?