
Collection of quotes on interesting notations and how they affect thought - ColinWright
https://github.com/hypotext/notation
======
motohagiography
I especially like that Chiang's "Story of your Life" is included there. I
found both the story and the movie personally significant, and the dance
notation that Edward Tufte included in either, Envisioning Information and
Quantitative Display is very good. Other examples might include how Feynman
diagrams changed how we thought about atoms, state diagrams how we thought
about algorithms. Sequence diagrams are vastly underappreciated for their
expressive power.

Inspired by Chiang, I think tree graphs as taxonomies can massively accelerate
how quickly people can absorb concepts. As a notation, it allows for breadth-
first understanding of linked ideas and the 'whys', instead of patching
together bits of depth-first competence. I've played with them for introducing
complex topics and people are shocked at being able to absorb things that took
others years to apprehend. The knowledge is not competence, just as the map is
not the territory, but exploring territory with a map is very efficient.

My own interest in representing concepts led me to my current project where, I
found that the poor quality of security assessments was more an artifact of
how we represent systems and risk, and not the knowledge of the person doing
it.

Like Wolfram, Chiang's story, and others in the OPs list, or even the Luther
Bible, a translation from Greek and Latin to regional German, notation can
have the same effect as automation, and the challenge of a new notation is
that it disrupts the equilibrium in the economy of people who were gatekeepers
to the previous one.

In this way, notations aren't just a detail, I'd say they are technologies
themselves. It's such an important area.

~~~
bangonkeyboard
Do you have an example of a tree-oriented concept explanation?

~~~
motohagiography
To test the concept, I put together a taxonomy of a topic few people
understand (dressage, or essentially, riding horses), which can be mystifying
from the ground up.

A taxonomy is right in the middle of an unstructured mind map, and a logically
parseable ontology. So maybe, a directed acyclic mindmap?:)

The practical parts of this are in the "Movements" branch of the tree, and
when you have expanded it, consider that most people learn this topic from
right to left, instead of left to right.

[https://www.qtra.io/hn-comment-answer](https://www.qtra.io/hn-comment-answer)

It uses code directly from the d3 example pages. I just wrote something for
parsing a csv file into a tree, which I think is now native to a few packages.

It doesn't give you physical competence (which can take decades), but a map of
the logic of categories is useful.

~~~
bangonkeyboard
That's a very impressive and tactile answer, thanks for taking the time to put
it together.

This seems to tie into the old debate of top-down versus bottom-up pedagogies.
A high-level map of a topic is indisputably valuable, but I personally find it
most useful as a guide for where to dive deep and back out, to make concrete
the abstractions; a more directed patching-together of competencies, as you
put it.

~~~
motohagiography
Thank you. Indeed, the top-down/bottom-up view of education is analogous to
the efficiency of breadth-first vs. depth-first searches in different
problems. Depends on what you want to achieve.

The reason I use these is I think a lot of suffering comes from (or can be
defined as) churning on deep-node problems without information from higher
level concepts, and a notation that "locates" meaning in an broader ontology
can relieve some of it, and yield new understanding.

I think this is a theme Ted Chiang is on to as well, as it appears in the
literary world as well as STEM.

------
Noumenon72
I was begging for something like this in ice skating class, where they would
just be like "watch me do left foot, rotate shoulders, turn 180, extend leg".
Too long of a sequence to remember without a reference, too hard recognize the
long sequences as composed of the same basic movements.

I liked the discussion of how Chinese symbols remain readable even when
pronunciation shifts, while phonetic alphabets become unclear -- helping
Chinese culture be more rooted in the past.

~~~
ColinWright
> _I was begging for something like this in ice skating class, where they
> would just be like "watch me do left foot, rotate shoulders, turn 180,
> extend leg". Too long of a sequence to remember without a reference, too
> hard recognize the long sequences as composed of the same basic movements._

This is, in part, why we ended up developing SiteSwap. Being able to
communicate and remember juggling sequences was really hard, and the notation
made a huge difference. The emergence of the underlying mathematics was a
bonus.

------
tgb
I just had a project where we need to keep track of changes to a string as a
series of insertions, deletions and substitutions. We don't want the whole
history, so if someone inserted then deleted the thing they inserted, we would
track that there was no change. Using notation like that of an (abstract)
algebra class computing "commutators" of the various operations (like D_n
means "delete character at position n" or I_{n,string} means "insert 'string'
before position n") helped me figure it out. This project is more complicated
than it sounds: my earlier attempts had me repeatedly try to just intuitively
write code but I kept running into problems and finding that my set-ups were
insufficient and practically impossible to make bug-free. Having an algebraic
notation made me make the order in which operations were performed explicit
and helped finally give me a decent representation of them.

------
carapace
It should mention Geometric Algebra (also called Clifford Algebra) IMO.

In general:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometric_algebra)

And specifically:
[http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/SpacetimePhysics.pdf](http://geocalc.clas.asu.edu/pdf/SpacetimePhysics.pdf)

Abstract:

> This is an introduction to spacetime algebra (STA) as a unified mathematical
> language for physics. STA simplifies, extends and integrates the
> mathematical methods of classical, relativistic and quantum physics while
> elucidating geometric structure of the theory. For example, STA provides a
> single, matrix-free spinor method for rotational dynamics with applications
> from classical rigid body mechanics to relativistic quantum theory – thus
> significantly reducing the mathematical and conceptual barriers between
> classical and quantum mechanics. The entire physics curriculum can be
> unified and simplified by adopting STA as the standard mathematical
> language. This would enable early infusion of spacetime physics and give it
> the prominent place it deserves in the curriculum.

------
pbhjpbhj
Does anyone know of a notation for martial arts sequences ("kata").

I'm thinking of making one, but if there's one already I'll probably just use
that.

It would I feel be similar to car rally course notations that co-drivers
create/use.

------
BoiledCabbage
From the link, this is an absolutely fascinating discussion on Juggling
notation.

Most notably it's "quantum mechanics" analogous interpretation about 2/3rd of
the way through.

[http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/JugglingTalkSummary.html#toc_n...](http://www.solipsys.co.uk/new/JugglingTalkSummary.html#toc_name000)

------
cosmic_ape
The description says:

>>>This list focuses on notation as "a series or system of written symbols
used to represent numbers, amounts, or elements in something such as music or
mathematics." This is _distinct_ from a language (computer or natural),
interface, diagram, visualization, or tool, but may overlap with them.

Not sure how this is distinct from a language. She has an example of a
notation for knots. This is a way to describe knots. Now, consider for example
a notation for describing binary valued functions of a binary arguments. We
have tables, the boolean algebra, with DNF and CNF, decision tree
representation, and for larger functions - VHDL, for example. All are
languages.

In fact, distinguishing between "language" and "notation" looks like a good
example of "bad notation".

------
amelius
I'm looking for a search-engine that can explain notation that I encounter
e.g. in scientific papers.

~~~
lgas
Not quite the same thing but detexify at least helps figure out any symbols
that LaTeX knows:
[http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html](http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html)

~~~
vkou
I've tried drawing a sigma symbol a couple of times, and it could not
recognize it.

~~~
DougMerritt
Unfortunate. After basic arithmetic symbols, sigma is arguably the next most
important thing. Along with integral/partial differential, let's say.

------
js8
Would be interesting if he could add something about Feynman diagrams.

