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0 pointsklibertp4y ago0 comments

> What was actually requested was a simple two page PDF.

But this is impossible, because, as I learned today, "math is a small field without money for things like this".

Thanks to my discussion here I was able to shift my perspective. Instead of thinking about an abstract thing, like "improving readability of math papers to non-mathematicians", I understood that I have to focus on people! In other words, on a bunch of guys frustrated that other STEM guys earn multiples of what they earn, even though their fields are so much "easier". Why would they help those various others use their work? They worked so hard to create the papers, living in a (shared with a philosopher) one bedroom apartment, writing their revolutionary insights on tissues stolen from McDonalds with a piece of charcoal - while those others can afford to buy computers (and even paper) easily, even though they don't work as hard as mathematicians at all!

It's just so unfair, and of course it's not like mathematicians are jealous or anything (not at all! really! honest!), it's just genuinely so much "harder" to do math, that most of those others won't be able to understand no matter what! Even if they actually listened to the masses and did as requested, the mathematicians already know that it would be useless, so there's no point in trying. Also, this is obvious, but worth noting: saying that most people are simply too dumb to ever understand the intricacies of math is not a prejudiced bias, ok, that's simply a conclusion of centuries of research into math education!

I honestly stopped expecting they'll do anything sensible ever, unless they really have no other choice. You might win against some people, but you won't ever defeat human nature.

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4 comments · 2 top-level

Jensson4y ago· 2 in thread

The fact that the teaching material is so horrible is probably the biggest reason learning programming is so easy, because if the teaching material would be any good then the CS grads would actually know difficult things and it would be harder for me to compete. But as is it is trivial to learn what they did, because they don't learn much. For programming it didn't take me long to learn programming well enough to get into Google and work on services with a million QPS or distributed machine learning training, because programming is really really simple. Not because you are good at teaching, no, I just sat and learned on my own just writing programs, all program tutorials and helps were horrible.

> But this is impossible, because, as I learned today, "math is a small field without money for things like this".

Of course it isn't impossible, that was never the problem here. Mathematicians have written plenty of such cheat sheets, you can find them everywhere just by Googling. Here is one for physics:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_physics_notatio...

Here is one for math:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glossary_of_mathematical_symbo...

Can you please understand that you are complaining that nobody created something that many many people have created many times over? I found those by googling "physics notation" and "math notation". Was that really too hard for you? If you want a cheat sheet specific for CS related papers, then that cheat sheet has to be written by someone with a CS background since a mathematician wont know what is useful to you, and neither will he know what quirky notation CS people use in their own papers since every domain of math has its own quirks.

What you are doing here is the equivalent of a guy wanting to learn python, and then going to the C++ comitee and complaining that no language is well documented online, and even when the C++ committee nicely shows you that in fact there is documentation of python online you still complain and say that nobody cares about your woes because that python documentation was in fact not easy enough for you to read!

klibertpOP4y ago

> because programming is really really simple

Millions of programmers that work hard and for a long time to master their trade are just dumb for not learning it instantly, like you. Poor bastards, deluding themselves they do somehow advance the field, while in reality programmers are just doing "tabs vs spaces" over and over again, and any kind of advancement is given to them by our benevolent mathematical overlords.

No. We've worked for decades to make programming this simple. You're driving an obviously overpowered car in a race, but choose to conveniently forget about its specs once you win.

> Mathematicians have written plenty of such cheat sheets, you can find them everywhere just by Googling. Here is one for physics

Sure they were created. I never said they weren't, so please stop insinuating that. I (not GGP) said specifically:

> It has literally nothing to do with explaining the syntax *close to where it's used*.

And that is not being done, so I really don't understand how the rest of the paragraph has anything to do with me.

> say that nobody cares about your woes because that python documentation was in fact not easy enough for you to read!

So? What's wrong with that? Are you telling me I'm dumb? Is it really all you can do?

Well, it's either that I'm simply an uneducated idiot, or that the documentation indeed could be better. You seem to default to the former. Well, I feel differently about that.

Jensson4y ago

> So? What's wrong with that? Are you telling me I'm dumb? Is it really all you can do?

No, I am saying that people take a long time to understand this. Programmers expects things to have a simple explanation behind it since in programming everything does have a simple explanation, since computers can only do very few things. But in math you quickly expand to concepts beyond, even as early as calculus you add infinities and continuous quantities and how to work with those, you can't ever program those things since those operations cannot be expressed using finite instructions. There is no "this function performs an integral on this other thing and is expressed using these steps of operations".

For example, lets say you want to sum 1/N^2 for N from 1 to infinity. How would you express that? You can't do it in a loop, since the loop never ends. You can stop at an arbitrary point, but how do you know that stopping there results in a good value? You can't, unless you do the math, calculus is a good tool to solve that. With it we can show that summing 1/N results in an infinite result, while 1/N^2 settles on a value and creates a way for you to calculate that value with error bars.

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JohnHaugeland4y ago

Imagine saying that it's impossible to make a 2 page PDF because there's no money for it

Honestly

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