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Comment by svat

Wouldn't that be backwards? The purpose of notation is to aid human thought and communication. Technology should adapt to whatever notation would be most useful to mathematicians, rather than mathematicians adapting their notation for the sake of technology (like “more easily typesettable”).

The blackboard-bold fonts are an interesting example of this, with computer typefaces being created for what mathematicians use in the real world. (Though Knuth and Serre and some other mathematicians don't approve of them in typesetting.) Besides, typesetting is a small part of the usage of notation; most of it is written in private by mathematicians for themselves or collaborators, in the classroom for students, in talks for each other, etc. (Typeset papers are a low-bandwidth communication medium, though good for broadcast and archival.) While it may make sense to optimize the ease of creation of typeset mathematics (and that is what Knuth etc. have done to some extent), changing the notation (for this reason) is not a sensible place to do that.

(Some related links: https://micromath.wordpress.com/2010/09/24/psychophysiology-... http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion60.html http://okasaki.blogspot.com/2008/01/why-i-dont-use-powerpoin... http://sites.math.rutgers.edu/~zeilberg/Opinion78.html Section 3 of https://arxiv.org/abs/math/9404236)

parent svat 9 years ago

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