Eniko Fox on Nostr: people always tell me "mathematical notation is just like jargon, its just more ...
people always tell me "mathematical notation is just like jargon, its just more efficient." no, mathematical notation is not like jargon
1. jargon are words. anyone can put a word into a search engine and find a glossary of terms explaining what that jargon word means in some context. you can't do that with math notation unless you already know math notation
2. jargon is almost never overloaded like mathematical notation is. the same letter or piece of punctuation can mean wildly different things in any given context and can even vary based on the *font the symbol is displayed in* inside one context
imagine if someone in software engineering used the symbol ⍼ instead of "garbage collector", except it only maps to "garbage collector" if it's written in sans serif. if it's written with serif, it means "compute shader" instead. but if its in comic sans it means "SIMD divide"
and also 98% of the time they used the ⍼ symbol it was inserted as a picture, not a copy/pastable unicode glyph. *that's* math notation
1. jargon are words. anyone can put a word into a search engine and find a glossary of terms explaining what that jargon word means in some context. you can't do that with math notation unless you already know math notation
2. jargon is almost never overloaded like mathematical notation is. the same letter or piece of punctuation can mean wildly different things in any given context and can even vary based on the *font the symbol is displayed in* inside one context
imagine if someone in software engineering used the symbol ⍼ instead of "garbage collector", except it only maps to "garbage collector" if it's written in sans serif. if it's written with serif, it means "compute shader" instead. but if its in comic sans it means "SIMD divide"
and also 98% of the time they used the ⍼ symbol it was inserted as a picture, not a copy/pastable unicode glyph. *that's* math notation