Quote: Original post by DaWanderer
It just dawned on me that mathematical notation is a lot like like obfuscated C, a la IOCCC.

Anyone else agree? Disagree?

Its like dirty sex. You do a lot of nasty stuff, and if you're lucky and you take the right way, you'll get a satisfying result.

It's a mess. Like everything we do. Probably wrong too.

So owl, are you drunk right now?

I'm just about to be. I'm in the instance where I don't give a f.ck about anything. Wich I enjoy quite a lot. Even if I get hurt.

Something I found out that's interesting. Throughout one of my books it always says "non-decreasing". Apparently that's used when there can duplicate items. I found it so odd that they didn't say increasing until I learned that.

I often assume that the math conventions make sense and that I'm not intelligent enough to realize the true genius of it all. :\

Quote: Original post by taby
Amen... :)

I've never done much work in the fields where Einstein notation is common, so it usually just makes things confusing because one person's thinking summation while the other's thinking component-wise multiplication.

Also, I misunderstood it when I first learned it. I originally thought it was summation over unspecified indices or indices not on both sides of a relation. That is, I thought

a = bi

involves a summation even though there's no repetition of indices while

ai = bici

does not even though it repeats the index.

Quote: Original quote by Sirisian
Throughout one of my books it always says "non-decreasing". Apparently that's used when there can duplicate items.

If you don't like using the "start" button to turn off your computer, you could say "monotonically increasing" to mean "non-decreasing".

Quote: Original post by nilkn
Further, if 1 is the multiplicative identity of a ring, it's common to write "2" in place of "1+1", even though the integer 2 is not necessarily an element of the ring.

It's no worse than having both the Dirac delta function and the Kronecker delta, and it's much better than having "m" being either mass or a quantum number.

Quote: Original post by Zahlman
The reason variables in mathematics are short is that you're working on the equations in the abstract. That is, there *isn't* a meaningful name to give to the variable because it *doesn't* represent or model a specific thing.

In my experience, the variables often represent something specific that's simply difficult to name. Take the shape parameters of a given probability distribution: these do represent something specific, but they are usually given some seemingly random Greek letters as names.

If we're not going to be handwriting these equations for the rest of our lives, is it that hard to call them shape_param1 and shape_param2 as opposed to alpha and beta? When coming from another field where alpha and beta have been given totally different meanings, at least I would have some hope of understanding an equation in a paper without having to find a document with the variable definitions (because the author has long since forgotten that alpha and beta can mean other things).

Fortress.

That is all.