Math. Maths. I swear to god that people who practice it don't give two shits if you understand what they're on about. It's a whole other language and yet it doesn't seem to be recognized as such. Ask someone who's into math a question and they'll shoot you back some indecipherable gibberish equation. wtf does x stand for in this context? a? A? w? This means jack shit without context or a pre-existing set of knowledge about the customs and practices of maths.
I'm going to try to decipher some of this crap. They're not making it easy. Go onto Wikipedia, try to start reading anything about math, and there's at least three new terms linked in the opening paragraph. Follow those links, and then each new link will spawn at least three new links... I'm sure there's a mathematical equation for this. For the rest of us, the equation is simple: this is bullshit.
This started when I was trying to read Wikipedia articles about machine learning and now I'm fucking here. These things have so much underlying knowledge required.
My backgroud is in writing code (software; web development) for a living, so I'm going to have my own set of understanding that you may not understand. Yeah, we're all guilty.
First tidbit. There's a convention to naming (though it's not strict):
There are also a number of conventions for the part of the alphabet from which variable names are chosen. For example, i, j, k, l, m, n are usually reserved for integers, w and z are often used for complex numbers, while a, b, c, α, β, γ are used for real numbers. The letters x, y, z are frequently used for unknowns to be found or as arguments of a function, while a, b, c are used for coefficients and f, g, h are mostly used as names of functions. These conventions are not hard rules. Instead these suggestions are met to enhance readability and to provide an intuition for of what kind a given object is, so that one has neither to remember, nor to check the introduction of the mathematical object.
They've got some typesetting conventions too (what should be bold, italic, printed in Roman font, etc.), but it looks like even they can't fully agree on how that goes, so we're gonna skip it. Is it 'math' or 'maths'? They're both valid, and who gives a flying fuck? Spaces or tabs?
Also, people who write about math are full of themselves and think of math as some kind of a goddess. They try to write poetically about it, but the result is difficult to decipher garbage. Just look at how logical and rational an explanation this paragraph starts off at, and where they take it. They couldn't help but turn it into dribble and garbage about their hard-on for fucking math:
Now mathematics is both a body of truth and a special language, a language more carefully defined and more highly abstracted than our ordinary medium of thought and expression. Also it differs from ordinary languages in this important particular: it is subject to rules of manipulation. Once a statement is cast into mathematical form it may be manipulated in accordance with these rules and every configuration of the symbols will represent facts in harmony with and dependent on those contained in the original statement. Now this comes very close to what we conceive the action of the brain structures to be in performing intellectual acts with the symbols of ordinary language. In a sense, therefore, the mathematician has been able to perfect a device through which a part of the labor of logical thought is carried on outside the central nervous system with only that supervision which is requisite to manipulate the symbols in accordance with the rules.
Aside: My laptop is acting up and I have to troubleshoot, so I'll leave it there for now.