I should've said "anything math-heavy," but even then, it seems like switching fields or applications of math requires understanding a new definition of the same symbols, and a lot of that could be avoided with words.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

I mean, if you get into any real depth with math, you are going to reach a point where you can't use conveniently use words to describe the symbols being manipulated.

As an example for the math I am doing literally right now, I very much prefer using C^+^~R~ compared to "semi circular arc in the upper half of the complex plane with radius R", or M^+^(f(z)) which means "Maximum of the magnitude of the function f(z) over C^+^~R~", which if I were to write out in full, would just become a clusterfuck.

Also you still wouldn't be able to get rid of symbols because some symbols are placeholders and straight up don't have any meaning in natural language. This occurs often in physics as well, not just pure maths. For example, the laplace transform of any function is written as a variable of "s", but "s" doesn't have a clear meaning (at least as far as I know).