Maybe the title should have been 'Algorithms that look concise and beautiful to people who already know them'.
I don't think an expert in some field who just happens not to be an expert in some other field's jargon and pictographs should be branded "a lowest common denominator of people", this terminology is both judgmental and elitist in all the bad ways.
I've seen plenty of function use, say, `theta` but I have never worked with θ.
There's a reason we use 'y = mx + b' instead of 'range = slope * domain + intercept' when we're doing math calculations. It's nice to use the long form when we're learning what the symbols are, but the symbols enhance readability when you're doing math, once you've become familiar with the meaning of the terms.
There is a reason why one letter/number variables are basically verboten in best practice.