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Comment by scottlocklin | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the early days failure of Maxwell was his notation was insane. As others notice below; Heaviside notation[1] made it a lot easier to follow and calculate things. Notation is underrated as increasing human power: I'm not sure General Relativity would have been possible without Christoffel notation. FWIIW fun stuff to read; Whittaker's theories of Aether and Electromagnetism gives the detailed history of all this. Cheap from Dover books. Mind blowing in how theoretical physics used to work.

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=nRJbAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA109#v=on...

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Einstein Notation is similar in this regard. It makes the 'mechanics' of tensor mathematics much easier to deal with. Kinda like how arabic numerals are a lot easier to manipulate than roman numerals.

I'm not sure sure, but I believe that Helen Dukas, Einstein's secretary, is the one who came up with Einstein notation originally. She was just trying to get through his notes faster when writing things up and that method of notation later became accepted. I can't find that citation though, so calling it Dukas Notation is for the moment erroneous.

To hell with it. So much great work from lowly support, frequently women, has been robbed of its rightful place. Call it Dukas notation until proved otherwise. Crick and Watson still have their ill-gotten novel prizes and most are unaware they are little more than thieves. (Wildly racist and sexist, sure, hard to deny that nowadays so we don't talk about it as loudly as we should).

tl;dr

"Dukas notation" just sounds good.

I believe that you have misunderstood. I do not know if Helen Dukas in fact is responsible for this.

I don't think so, fwiw.

"Call it Dukas notation until proved otherwise."

The 1st edition of his "History of the Theories of Aether and Electricity" is available for free here: https://archive.org/details/historyoftheorie00whitrich/page/...

Yes! Even the Pythagorean Theorem is a mouthful if you express it in Latin prose rather than algebra. And I assume universal gravitation is the same way.

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