Hacker News Reader

Comment by chestervonwinch | Hacker News Reader

1) Sometimes it's actually helpful to use greek letters when a convention is used. For example: capitals for matrices (A), lowercase for column vectors (a), and Greek for scalars (α).

2) I agree with the gist of your point, but I'm guessing you're being down-voted because you come off as sort of flippant. Anyhow, I've long thought that mathematics should have hover-text to help remove the mental overhead of translating the concise notation to meaningful interpretation. Obviously, using variables names like `velocity_of_thing` is much too verbose in mathematics (papers would 1000's of pages); however, β with hover-text "This is the velocity vector of the thing." would be super helpful IMO.

View on HN

Just the other day I spent a solid 30 minutes trying to distinguish between I and Iⱼ in an equation of motion. Turns out that the former was the identity matrix and the later was the inertial matrix of body j.

If there's a way to add that sort of hover annotation in LaTeX, I'd gladly use that for my thesis.

It seems there is a method to add tooltips, though it looks a little rough. Worth a shot, I suppose. https://tex.stackexchange.com/q/155518/77180

> Obviously, using variables names like `velocity_of_thing` is much too verbose in mathematics

That is not obvious to me. Perhaps in a purely mathematical paper with dozens of formulas, but that's not my field of study. In any paper I read of any discipline, I never came across any paper filled with enough formulas that it would make sense to compress at the cost of clarity.

I fully agree, though, on following conventions (that only conveys extra context) and using hover text to act as a quick lookup function. I actually looked for the latter in the past but couldn't find a way to do it in LaTeX.

> I never came across any paper filled with enough formulas that it would make sense to compress at the cost of clarity

Fair point, but with this approach, even simple formulae could really clutter up a page if the variable names are long and descriptive (imagine just a rational function!). Also, as with programming, folks might abbreviate (e.g., `vel_thg`) and then we're nearly back at square one.

Also in programming, when my girlfriend (the mathematician[1]) used single letters in code and I helped her with the coding part of it, she had to remind me what some letters stood for. With acronyms or abbreviations I might need to ask a first time (or maybe not even that, especially if you put a comment with the full version upon declaration), but it's definitely easier to remember what is what.

But anyway that's programming. Papers are a little different of course, with limited space so usually there are no big code parts with declarations and comments. Which is also why I like blog posts: things are clickable and interactive. A PDF is super static and you can't expect a reader to click through to the code or to be able to zoom in.

[1] well, she claims not to be, but from my POV it's math even if she says it's a subfield.

It's like programming languages: people want loud syntax for things that are new, but short syntax for familiar concepts.

Math is heavily optimized for peope already familiar with the topic at hand. In many cases, that's the only way you have a chance of understanding the paper at all. So long names would just be noise to the main audience of the paper.

Is there a standard notation that can produce both? I don't know much LaTex but I don't think it holds sufficient information. Does MathML maybe?

The MathML standard is split into two parts, Presentation MathML, which is widely used and contains roughly the same information as TeX, and Semantic MathML which is used by a handful of computer algebra systems. The latter does what you want.

Both formats have their origins in Wolfram Mathematica.

Somehow I never considered hover-text for math. Now I'm actually rather angry that it's not already standard, what with papers being distributed digitally. Keeping track of notation when reading papers is the bane of my existence.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com