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Comment by methodin | Hacker News Reader

I really wish my brain didn't gloss over the first time I see a math symbol. All of this stuff seems intriguing but it's almost as if I'm hardwired to translate all those symbols into mush. I'd be much more interested in seeing the equivalent code snippets these ideas express.

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For several of the equations presented, there's not really a "code equivalent". And for most of the others, presenting it in code form would make it much more verbose and complex than it needs to be. In a way, it's already written in code – it's just been written by mathematicians :)

It can be a bit daunting at first, but I find mathematical concepts and notation extremely useful tools for programmers, especially when designing algorithms. It allows you to express powerful, abstract ideas in a few lines whereas the same reasoning in pseudo-code would take much more time and effort.

I'm glad my undergraduate program was heavy on the math (although I hated it at the time)– it made graduate CS courses easier to understand, and programming easier for me in the long term. I actually miss my pure math courses now.

That's because mathematical notation is context-bound and telegraphic. Gerry Sussman has gone so far as to call it "Impressionistic". Beyond basic arithmetic and elementary algebra, it is much more concise than it is precise -- it is often inconsistent (the "power" in cos^2 x doesn't mean the same thing as it does in cos^-1 x, for instance), and there's a lot of hand-waviness (and sometimes some outright lies) in order to make the notation concise. It's a useful jargon for the initiated, but it is hardly self-explanatory even if you know what the individual symbols are supposed to mean.

A code-like representation may have the disadvantage of being more verbose, but it has the advantage of being unambiguous. It gives up conciseness in favour of precision. And no, it is not impossible to represent mathematical concepts in a code-like manner -- it just forces you to actually say all of what you mean rather than using an ambiguous and incomplete shorthand.

I have the same problem, but I think I figured out a way around it.

You have to fight the gloss-over effect. It takes conscious effort. Remember that "deliberate practice" all those blog entries say it takes to master something? Well, same thing. You have to deliberately overcome your brain's tendency to go "math is hard, let's go shopping!" Eventually you'll be able to look at an equation and recognize patterns. When I hit the link I was like "Oh, man, MATH, so bo-- hey wait, that's Bayes's theorem! I know this!" (Yes, just like the Jurassic Park girl.)

So keep working at it. Maybe you'll want to try -- gasp! -- actually cracking a math book and studying the material they present.

Seems like a lot of effort for an unknown gain - to me. It's about the same as reading a code block in Scala. It may or may not be useful to me but to figure that out I have to go off into a completely different world. I just wish the mathematical symbols weren't hiding so much meaning. Can I really guess what a backwards-E-equals-looking symbol is? Nope. I get it wrong every time.

I've found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_mathematical_symbols to be helpful when deciphering formulas. It's hard to remember what all the notation means sometimes.

I pretty much feel the same way but I feel like I'm up for the challenge and I keep trying to cover as much as possible I can in my free time (a side-effect of my unemployment).

You better toughen up and immerse yourself in math

I actually surround myself in math all the time since I do a lot of game development. A poster above pointed to the math symbol list on wikipedia and I think "Great. I need to scour a daunting page to find the meaning of an obscure symbol?" It's pretty similar to reading a post in another language and I'm not sure it's worth my time considering by the time I figure that out I would have spent an hour decyphering the equations. Google translate for math, perhaps? I'd use it.

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