Learning to write math is learning to have clear ideas. Wouldn’t it be a shame to deprive yourself of that? By writing math yourself, you’ll get to understand why it is written in such a bizarre formalism, in this language made for robots: there’s really no other choice. To demonstrate, we’ll return to another of our favorite examples: the concept

It’s not surprising if you couldn’t find the words to describe how you tie your shoes. Most likely, you didn’t even try. Writing mathematics, that is, transcribing mental images with enough clarity and precision to allow others to understand and reproduce them, is an art.

Mathematicians don’t have this option and it’s a huge problem for them. In their minds, the ideas are luminous, simple, and powerful. On paper, they become stunted and sad. The mathematicians’ curse is that they can only play math in their own heads. If you taught children music by giving them the written scores for Mozart or Michael Jackson to dec