Hot take, in my opinion this is one of the reasons pseudo-code or even sometimes code is easier to parse than formal math expressions, especially in the context of physics.
What do the variables mean? It is often difficult or impossible to google them even if you know the correct name of the symbol and there is very little consistency to give you hints, a symbol in superscript is an exponent? A signifier?
Niche areas of academia will abstractly define a variable/constant as a community and then reference it in papers as if everyone who reads any papers on the topic from now on will magically know the variable. At least in programming the variable has to be defined in the code and is easily searchable on a search engine…
The only math notation I have encountered that I actually think is elegant is set theory and category theory notation.
In case of math literature, I’d say it is mainly because the equations would be horribly long.
Things like integral computation comes with lots of details, or some kind of long exact sequence. Experts would have trouble understanding it, while normal people almost certainly have no interest in understanding the formulae.
Also, often there is no meaning to the variable. Like, in a real function f(x), x is just “a real variable”. There is no additional meaning to it.
As for other fields, I dunno. They might have copied math literature style or something.
I think you can extend this problem to all academic writing. Make it dry, impersonal, formal and fancy. Use big words and long complex sentences, my college English teacher liked to say.
And what a racket the MLA handbook is, huh?
Back when I was in flight school, I was taught how to read Area Forecasts. This is a general outlook of the weather over a large area, say, the American Southeast. They’re about a page long and read like this:
SYNOPSIS…LOW PRES TROF 10Z OK/TX PNHDL AREA FCST MOV EWD INTO CNTRL-SWRN OK BY 04Z. WRMFNT 10Z CNTRL OK-SRN AR-NRN MS FCST LIFT NWD INTO NERN OK-NRN AR EXTRM NRN MS BY 04Z.
Synopsis: Low pressure trough at 10:00 GMT in Oklahoma/Texas panhandle area forecast to move eastward into central-southwestern Oklahoma by 4:00 GMT. etc.
Know why they abbreviated it all like that? Because when they first started doing this these forecasts would be distributed by telegraph or teletype. The most common way individual pilots would get this information was to call a flight service station on the telephone and have a briefer read it to them.
We have the internet now; the NWS doesn’t publish text Area Forecasts anymore, not for the continental United States anyway. They instead have internet-based animated weather maps which can show observations and forecasts graphically, which is a lot easier to understand than a severely abbreviated block of allcaps.
Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”
Title: Principles Of Magnetopticalacoustic Levitation In The Comfort And Privacy Of Your Own Bathroom
Author: Linus Sebastian et. al.
Date of Publication: December 42, 1310
ISBN: 000000000133
Pages referenced: 14-16
You could do this in Notepad, there’s no need for an association to make up rules and publish an inch thick reference book, and it would be much more readable to normal non-academics who might want or need the study instead of being so impenetrable there’s an industry of writing news article-like summaries of studies that draw conclusions from the study that the study doesn’t actually say. Problem with my approach is it killed two parasitic business models which is why it’s done the way it’s done.
Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”
I’m still a bit puzzled why we can’t just have various headings in the bibliography, if you want to make it absolutely unambiguous what sort of document you’re referencing? Sure, your average Joe on the street might not know how to use a DOI to find a journal article, or an ISBN for a book, but what’s the issue with something like this below?
Books
Cite your stuff here with all pertinent information.
Periodicals
See above
Journals
…
Films
etc.
It may not be as elegant and information dense as whatever style manual your field uses with placement and formatting of the information, but it’s pretty clear what is what without needing to whip up a whole style manual that will be entirely unknown to anyone outside of your own field of study.
Then again, I’m quite firmly of the opinion that any style manual that advocates in-text citations is an abomination that deserves to have said manuals gathered up and burned, and their creators and proponents sent to re-education camps until they learn the error of their ways and admit the superiority of footnotes or end notes for readability, while maintaining ease of checking references. Personally, I favor footnotes to avoid having to flip back and forth, but I’m also a fan of end notes when there is any further commentary provided on the citation that is useful to know, but would be disruptive to the main text of the document.
I think there’s another problem. We’ve sent a LOT of people to get associates or bachelor’s degrees. They pretty much all took ENG111 and probably 112, which are expository and persuasive writing courses, which for many majors will be their only exposure to scholarly research and writing; the rest of their college experience and then their work in the field won’t have anything to do with it. So the main takeaway from these courses are what scholarly (and thus trustworthy) articles look like, aesthetically. “Yep, it’s got a Works Cited page with every combination of formatting MS Word can generate. This article titled The Practice of Psychotherapy On The Planet Saturn” must be legit. See? It’s indented the way my English teacher taught us. This is serious."
Yeah because I stopped just before “WRMFNT”. From there it reads:
Warm front from 10:00 GMT in central Oklahoma through Southern Arkansas through Northern Mississippi forecast to lift northward into northeastern Oklahoma through northern Arkansas, extreme northern Mississippi by 04:00 GMT.
Hot take, in my opinion this is one of the reasons pseudo-code or even sometimes code is easier to parse than formal math expressions, especially in the context of physics.
What do the variables mean? It is often difficult or impossible to google them even if you know the correct name of the symbol and there is very little consistency to give you hints, a symbol in superscript is an exponent? A signifier?
Niche areas of academia will abstractly define a variable/constant as a community and then reference it in papers as if everyone who reads any papers on the topic from now on will magically know the variable. At least in programming the variable has to be defined in the code and is easily searchable on a search engine…
The only math notation I have encountered that I actually think is elegant is set theory and category theory notation.
In case of math literature, I’d say it is mainly because the equations would be horribly long. Things like integral computation comes with lots of details, or some kind of long exact sequence. Experts would have trouble understanding it, while normal people almost certainly have no interest in understanding the formulae.
Also, often there is no meaning to the variable. Like, in a real function f(x), x is just “a real variable”. There is no additional meaning to it.
As for other fields, I dunno. They might have copied math literature style or something.
I think you can extend this problem to all academic writing. Make it dry, impersonal, formal and fancy. Use big words and long complex sentences, my college English teacher liked to say.
And what a racket the MLA handbook is, huh?
Back when I was in flight school, I was taught how to read Area Forecasts. This is a general outlook of the weather over a large area, say, the American Southeast. They’re about a page long and read like this:
SYNOPSIS…LOW PRES TROF 10Z OK/TX PNHDL AREA FCST MOV EWD INTO CNTRL-SWRN OK BY 04Z. WRMFNT 10Z CNTRL OK-SRN AR-NRN MS FCST LIFT NWD INTO NERN OK-NRN AR EXTRM NRN MS BY 04Z.
Synopsis: Low pressure trough at 10:00 GMT in Oklahoma/Texas panhandle area forecast to move eastward into central-southwestern Oklahoma by 4:00 GMT. etc.
Know why they abbreviated it all like that? Because when they first started doing this these forecasts would be distributed by telegraph or teletype. The most common way individual pilots would get this information was to call a flight service station on the telephone and have a briefer read it to them.
We have the internet now; the NWS doesn’t publish text Area Forecasts anymore, not for the continental United States anyway. They instead have internet-based animated weather maps which can show observations and forecasts graphically, which is a lot easier to understand than a severely abbreviated block of allcaps.
Explain to me how the MLA or APA rules for formatting citations are any different? “When it’s a periodical, you put this part in bold and that part in italics, but when it’s an entry in a journal…” Surely there’s a way to do this in plaintext with the rule of “list things about your source until you’re confident someone else can look it up.”
Title: Principles Of Magnetopticalacoustic Levitation In The Comfort And Privacy Of Your Own Bathroom Author: Linus Sebastian et. al. Date of Publication: December 42, 1310 ISBN: 000000000133 Pages referenced: 14-16
You could do this in Notepad, there’s no need for an association to make up rules and publish an inch thick reference book, and it would be much more readable to normal non-academics who might want or need the study instead of being so impenetrable there’s an industry of writing news article-like summaries of studies that draw conclusions from the study that the study doesn’t actually say. Problem with my approach is it killed two parasitic business models which is why it’s done the way it’s done.
I’m still a bit puzzled why we can’t just have various headings in the bibliography, if you want to make it absolutely unambiguous what sort of document you’re referencing? Sure, your average Joe on the street might not know how to use a DOI to find a journal article, or an ISBN for a book, but what’s the issue with something like this below?
Books
Cite your stuff here with all pertinent information.
Periodicals
See above
Journals
…
Films
etc.
It may not be as elegant and information dense as whatever style manual your field uses with placement and formatting of the information, but it’s pretty clear what is what without needing to whip up a whole style manual that will be entirely unknown to anyone outside of your own field of study.
Then again, I’m quite firmly of the opinion that any style manual that advocates in-text citations is an abomination that deserves to have said manuals gathered up and burned, and their creators and proponents sent to re-education camps until they learn the error of their ways and admit the superiority of footnotes or end notes for readability, while maintaining ease of checking references. Personally, I favor footnotes to avoid having to flip back and forth, but I’m also a fan of end notes when there is any further commentary provided on the citation that is useful to know, but would be disruptive to the main text of the document.
I think there’s another problem. We’ve sent a LOT of people to get associates or bachelor’s degrees. They pretty much all took ENG111 and probably 112, which are expository and persuasive writing courses, which for many majors will be their only exposure to scholarly research and writing; the rest of their college experience and then their work in the field won’t have anything to do with it. So the main takeaway from these courses are what scholarly (and thus trustworthy) articles look like, aesthetically. “Yep, it’s got a Works Cited page with every combination of formatting MS Word can generate. This article titled The Practice of Psychotherapy On The Planet Saturn” must be legit. See? It’s indented the way my English teacher taught us. This is serious."
But but your plain English description is shorter than that soup letter.
Yeah because I stopped just before “WRMFNT”. From there it reads:
Warm front from 10:00 GMT in central Oklahoma through Southern Arkansas through Northern Mississippi forecast to lift northward into northeastern Oklahoma through northern Arkansas, extreme northern Mississippi by 04:00 GMT.