I’m curious if anyone has advice on how to understand all the symbols used in math papers. Frequently I find this is the first barrier for me in reading them.
For each symbol, I try to make an analogy. For "e", for example, I have the notion of "continuous growth". The formal definition is this:
https://betterexplained.com/ColorizedMath/content/img/E_(mat...
"The base for continuous growth is the unit quantity earning unit interest for unit time."
Once you see the role of each part of the definition, the idea snaps into place. I just wrote about it here: https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math-equation...
Hope that helps!
Analogies are utterly unhelpful without a thorough understanding of the actual definitions.
or rather like net to catch the fish. once you have the fish, you can forget about the net.
this is not far removed from words, which are used to convey meaning. once you have meaning you can forget about the words ;)
edit-001 : fmt changes.
>or rather like net to catch the fish. once you have the fish, you can forget about the net.
So you can forget about the net ... like a raft to cross a river?! ;o)
Why?
For example, an approximation of e would be (1 + .01)^100, where the 100% interest had been chopped into 100 separate segments of 1%.
It's difficult to google mathematical stuff, especially since each symbol has many different meanings depending on which branch of mathematics you're dealing with - this book solves that problem nicely by letting you look up by the roman letter a symbol is similar to, by mathematical discipline, etc.
This has been great for helping me figure out what to even call various symbols so I can then go look up what they actually intend you to do.
Anyway, I still read some symbols differently.