Yeah I find that I reason about math in my head with names for symbols - the visual shape is not sufficient for the math part of my brain to manipulate it as a symbol.
Same. If I see a symbol and can't "say" the symbol, I can't (easily) process it. I think over time that gets better and eventually it's possible to start to "pattern match" it just off the visual representation, but at least for me when something is new, I need the "name" of it as something I can say to myself or I hit a ParseException. :-(
