from Hacker News

Using Emojis in Mathematical Notation

by rmeertens on 11/23/20, 12:01 PM with 72 comments

• by notRobot on 11/25/20, 3:59 AM

  Yeah, no. Please don't do this. This has been discussed previously w.r.t commit messages, and I'd argue that the reasons for not doing so with maths are largely the same: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21760021

  ---

  They're bad for accessibility. Don't work with screen readers . Hard to make out for people without perfect vision. Harder to type out.

  They don't render well on many systems. They can't be handwritten. How are they do be pronounced? "croissant emoji squared plus girl wearing hat"?

  Conventions exist for what symbols to use where in science and math. Don't mess with this. Kids won't magically find math easier if you use emoji in place of symbols.

  Instead, please focus your efforts of improving teaching methods.

• by techwizrd on 11/25/20, 2:30 AM

  I think emoji would make it challenging for students. Students already struggle to decipher the handwriting and foreign notation of their professors. Adding emoji to that mix would make it even harder to keep up, and many emoji (and mathematical symbols, to be fair) are difficult to write down.

  I would have struggled during my math and stats degrees if I had to distinguish between emoji and mathematical notation.

• by forgotpwd16 on 11/25/20, 7:47 AM

  >Math is hard to understand.

  Because of the concepts used.

  >I have to translate every character back to the concept meant by this character

  Using emojis for variables won't help with that.

  >Every scientific domain has its usual notation for specific concepts

  Does that imply each emoji be used for a single concept across all domains? Not only that won't be possible (considering people don't even always use same variable for something, e.g. Pythagorean theorem being a^2+b^2=c^2, α^2+β^2=γ^2, x^2+y^2=c^2, ...) but is also a bad idea even if it could work as it will imply you've to remember every single emoji used.

  Again, math is about concepts not what symbol you use for a variable. Using emojis won't make anything easier to teach or to understand.

• by shhsshs on 11/25/20, 5:56 AM

  This paragraph convinced me:

  https://i.ibb.co/WsgQYHq/PNG-image.png

• by heinrichhartman on 11/25/20, 8:24 AM

  In my experience, math is 99% handwriting. You only put it into Latex once you solved the problem. Exploration and experiments are done on with pen and paper.

  This is also the reason why notation is often terse, and highly domain/author specific. You get tired of writing long_variable_names very quickly if you do it OVER AND OVER by hand. Now think about how much work and confusion it would be to replace those symbols with little paintings...

• by blackbear_ on 11/25/20, 8:22 AM

  I need to see way more than Pythagoras' theorem to be convinced. Show me a couple of pages of "complex" concepts, with something like ten equations involving summations, triple indices and whatnot. Something like this [1] (no affiliation, first random thing I found). I bet emojis will make it even worse.

  [1] https://www.jefkine.com/general/2016/09/05/backpropagation-i...

• by Zhyl on 11/25/20, 11:59 AM

  I feel this links quite closely to the 'Tau' debate around notation [0]. The idea behind using Tau is that it makes equations more easily relatable to Circles and highlights rotation where the concept exists. One of the cases for these emojis is to more easily highlight function of variables and to highlight the equation. Both of these are also along the same lines as coloured equations [1].

  Something I strongly disagree with in both the Tau manifesto and this Emoji manifesto, is the notion that Tau and Emoji should be encorporated into the official literature. Pi is 'wrong' - always use Tau. Einstein's papers would be easier to understand if you used the fire emoji instead of E.

  Of course not. But in the other hand, the responses to these arguments attack that aspect of the claim rather than the intent behind them. "You can't use Tau because all textbooks use Pi. You would need to reprint all textbooks in the world". "You can't use emoji because the support is bad, you can't draw them and you can't pronounce them."

  What we're missing, and where all of these belong, is in a formal explanation format. Most attempts to break down and make concepts more palatable tend to be blogs, YouTube or even broadcast media. We don't see anything in between 'formal paper or textbook' and 'colourful diagram aimed at beginners'. Where are the colourful diagrams for your latest paper on Flat Chains in Banach spaces?

  [0] https://tauday.com

  [1] https://betterexplained.com/articles/colorized-math-equation...

• by definetheword on 11/25/20, 3:11 AM

  I don’t know, my initial thought is that it’s fairly distracting and makes me pause longer to think. Anyone sensing the opposite?

• by uoaei on 11/25/20, 2:22 AM

  emoji is both the singular and plural form of the word.

• by AnonC on 11/25/20, 7:49 AM

  This is definitely not universally readable (even for people with average eyesight) and looks like it won’t be for a long time. I skimmed through it and saw several lines filled with a series of [?][?] on a device with the latest available OS. I checked on another device (with a different OS) and could read the emoji replacements. The publisher may be excluding a large number of people with this method.

• by jhanschoo on 11/25/20, 7:18 AM

  Emoji in math has a useful niche, illustrating basic mathematics for young schoolchildren, and for simple recreational puzzles. Beyond this, the accessibility issues raised by others seem to be a greater concern to me.

• by thomasahle on 11/25/20, 9:28 AM

  Reading this in Firefox all I see is lots of [?] boxes.

  I almost thought the entire article was sarcasm until I looked through Chrome.

• by a-nikolaev on 11/25/20, 2:44 AM

  Many math papers do use weird LaTeX characters [1], for example Halloweenmath [2]. And even though it does not look like there is a shortage of symbols for writing math, emoji can be used too, just be tasteful about it.

    [1] http://tug.ctan.org/info/symbols/comprehensive/symbols-letter.pdf
    [2] http://www.ctan.org/pkg/halloweenmath

• by anordal on 11/25/20, 8:03 AM

  Why is math restricted to single-character identifiers in the first place?

  energy = mass · lightspeed²

  ↑ As you would do in programming.

• by rambojazz on 11/27/20, 8:49 AM

  This is just terrible to look at.

• by zaptheimpaler on 11/25/20, 7:18 AM

  kill me now yeet me to the astral plane

• by partingshots on 11/25/20, 3:37 AM

  This is great; emojis to entice younger generations into the world of math. I love it!