A lot of people here suggesting they'd be great mathematicians if only it wasn't for the pesky notation. What they are missing is that the notation is the easy part..
I hope mathematicians have a better reason than "it's tradition" for making the entire field completely opaque to anyone who hasn't studied math extensively.
If they can't see that, it's hard to think they have much chance with the actual math. "A mathematician is a person who knows how to separate the relevant from the irrelevant", a saying I was told in school.
This is so wrong it can only come from a place of inexperience and ignorance.
Mathematics is flush with inconsistent, abbreviated, and overloaded notation.
Show a child a matrix numerically and they can understand it, show them Ax+s=b, and watch the confusion.
Sorry, the notation is bit confusing. The 'A' here is a matrix.
It's good to be able to think and talk in terms of abstractions that do not force viewing analogous situations in very different terms. This is much of what math is about.
Thanks for the laughs :D
> Show a child a matrix numerically and they can understand it, show them Ax+s=b, and watch the confusion.
Show a HN misunderstood genius Riemann Zeta function as a Zeta() and they think they can figure out it's zeros. Show it as a Greek letter and they'll lament how impossible it is to understand.