Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

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> I am tilting at windmills, but I am continually annoyed at the sloppiness of mathematicians in writing. Fine, you don’t like verbosity, but for didactic purposes, please do not assume the reader is equipped to know that variable x actually implies variable y.

I am a practicing mathematician who felt the same way you did when I started, and who still writes their papers in a way that many of my colleagues feel is gallingly pedantic. With that as my credentials, I hope I may say that it can be much worse as a reader to read something where every detail is spelled out, because a bit of syntactic sugar begins to seem as important as the heart of an argument. Where the dividing line is between precision and obfuscation depends on the reader, and so inevitably will leave some readers on the wrong side, but a trade-off does have to be made somewhere.

I wish the formality would be included in an appendix — as someone who has had to implement a lot of things (and more than once, found errors).

But I agree with your general point: understanding the recipe and general thrust of the approach is often more important, because even if the exact proof misses some technical detail, that can often be patched.

> I wish the formality would be included in an appendix — as someone who has had to implement a lot of things (and more than once, found errors).

Indeed. Lamport says that this was part of what inspired his interest in formal proofs: https://mathoverflow.net/questions/35727/community-experienc....

Could there be a compromise where the verbosity is kept but the key points are highlighted, grouped or presented in a different color.

I would certainly appreciate if math papers were more explicit and "hand-holding" but understand why trained mathematicians would find that tedious.

> Could there be a compromise where the verbosity is kept but the key points are highlighted, grouped or presented in a different color.

There's no reason except inertia why there couldn't be. Lamport actually proposed a system for this: https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/lamport-how-to-write.....

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