this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023
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math
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General community for all things mathematics on @lemmy.world
Submit link and text posts about anything at all related to mathematics.
Questions about mathematical topics are allowed, but NO HOMEWORK HELP. Communities for general math and homework help should be firmly delineated just as they were on reddit.
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Part of what's going on here is that math notation is ... not good. Not for understanding, readability or explanation. Add in the prestige that surrounds being "good at math" and "being able to read that stuff?" and you get an unhealthy amount of gate keeping.
Whenever I've been able to find someone breakdown a set of equations into computer code has been a wonderful clarifying experience. And I think it goes beyond just being better at code or something. Computer code, more often, is less forgiving about what exactly is going on in the system. Maths, IME, often leaves some ambiguity or makes some presumption in the style of "oh, of course you'd need to do that". While if you going to write a program, it all needs to be there, explicitly.
I recommend Brett Victor's stuff on this: Kill Math
It's funny, with the increase in use of numerical models, so much math has been turned into computer code. Derivatives and integrals as well are defined by finite difference formulas that serve as the basis for the notations. The point of them isn't to explain, it's just to simplify writing and reading it. I agree it can be a bit obtuse but if you had to write out a for loop to solve a math equation every time it would take forever lol