Comment by breezybottom

8 hours ago

That's something only someone who's never studied advanced math could say. Math notation and jargon can be extremely ambiguous and overloaded. "Normal" has about 20 different meanings.

Certainly overloaded but rarely ambiguous. Context will determine which notion of “normal” applies.

  • "Context dependent" is basically the definition of ambiguity.

    • No, I'd say ambiguous means "context dependent" and the context is unclear.

      Pronouns like you/me/he/she/they/them are context dependent in everyday English writing but they're only ambiguous when the context is unclear, otherwise most people have no trouble dealing with them at all!

    • I guess what I’m saying is that since there’s always a context, ambiguity stemming from uninspired naming is never an issue in practice.

Strives to minimize =/= completely eliminates

  • I haven't seen much of this "striving". Notation use is largely passed down from instructor to student, and there isn't much interest in the mathematical community to standardize.