First of all, mathematicians never use descriptive names in their formulae. They use letters, often starting with greek letters, then when they have exhausted all the greek letters they pull out other letters from other languages.
Most of us don't have keyboards with all those letters, or that can even reproduce them easily. Let alone having learned them or not. Sometimes the letters are barely distinguishable from other letters in the same formula, from another language perhaps. And the names don't have meaning to the uninitiated, though that part may be the least bad, as over time one becomes so used to the greek letter, or whatever, that the technical name is barely used anymore or maybe even never well learned. So it is with sigma, rho, and a few others, at least for me.
Then the letters can have an endless variety of qualifying marks, little hats, tick marks at varying angles, circles, crosses, bolded crosses, dots, underlines. Then you can have subscripting, superscripting, repeated superscripting.
This of course provides a way to make the most complicated formulae compact. It enables symbolic operations, and writing things down with variations to get at some end (though mathematicians and many math books forgo many if not all intermediate steps anyway).
So it may indeed be good, in most ways, for the professional, for it to be like this.
It's generally not good for explaining things to people who are not professional mathematicians.
Most of us don't have keyboards with all those letters, or that can even reproduce them easily. Let alone having learned them or not. Sometimes the letters are barely distinguishable from other letters in the same formula, from another language perhaps. And the names don't have meaning to the uninitiated, though that part may be the least bad, as over time one becomes so used to the greek letter, or whatever, that the technical name is barely used anymore or maybe even never well learned. So it is with sigma, rho, and a few others, at least for me.
Then the letters can have an endless variety of qualifying marks, little hats, tick marks at varying angles, circles, crosses, bolded crosses, dots, underlines. Then you can have subscripting, superscripting, repeated superscripting.
This of course provides a way to make the most complicated formulae compact. It enables symbolic operations, and writing things down with variations to get at some end (though mathematicians and many math books forgo many if not all intermediate steps anyway).
So it may indeed be good, in most ways, for the professional, for it to be like this.
It's generally not good for explaining things to people who are not professional mathematicians.
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