Comment by hoosieree
4 years ago
Math notation is highly context dependent (is + addition or boolean or?) and yet authors rarely feel the need to provide context.
If they wrote in an array language instead of LaTeX, not only would it make writing papers easier (+/ is shorter than either \Sigma or \sum), but it would be trivially reproducible, due to being an executable notation.
Yeah… for actual papers “easier to read” is 1000x more important than “easier to write.”
Somewhere on YouTube is a talk where Gerald Sussman described mathematics (or at least mathematical presentation) as "impressionistic."
I think he says that in every talk he gives. https://youtu.be/HB5TrK7A4pI?t=1090, https://youtu.be/arMH5GjBwUQ?t=377, https://youtu.be/EbzQg7R2pYU?t=3201, etc. There's a 2002 paper where he uses the term: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/6707/AIM-2002...