you've heard of security by obscurity. mathematical notation is elitism by obscurity

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@eniko

On one hand, very often the notation is annoyingly imprecise, making it hard to understand for anyone who is not familiar with the concrete area (e.g. anything about PDEs).

On the other, when the notation is precise, it reduces the amount of reliance on comprehension of whatever language the text is written in (and in particular reduces the requirements around understanding how one expresses e.g. quantifier order and other things that are rarely relevant in everyday use of that language).

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