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283 points IdealeZahlen | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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non- ◴[] No.42139412[source]
One thing I've always struggled with Math is keeping track of symbols I don't know the name of yet.

Googling for "Math squiggle that looks like a cursive P" is not a very elegant or convenient way of learning new symbol names.

I wish every proof or equation came with a little table that gave the English pronunciation and some context for each symbol used.

It would make it a lot easier to look up tutorials & ask questions.

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xg15 ◴[] No.42141247[source]
This. Related to that, I'll also never get used to mathematicians' habit to assign semantic meaning to the font that a letter is drawn in. Thanks to that, we now have R, Bold R, Weirdly Double-Lined R, Fake-Handwritten R, Fraktur R and probably another few more.

All of those you're of course expected to properly distinguish in handwriting.

I'm sure most of them have some sort of canonical name, but I'm usually tempted to read them with different intonations.

(Oh and of course each of those needs a separate Unicode character to preserve the "semantics". Which I imagine is thrilling edgy teenagers in YouTube comments and hackers looking for the next homograph attack)

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1. ◴[] No.42141452[source]