The Future

Perhaps to finish off, let me talk a little about the future of mathematical
notation.

If there is any new notation, what should it be, for example?

Well, in books of symbols there are perhaps 2500 symbols listed that are
supposedly common in some field or another and aren�t letters in languages. And
with the right drawing of characters, quite a few of these could be made perfectly
to fit in with other mathematical characters.

What would one use them for?

Well, the most obvious possibility is notation for representing programs as well
as mathematical operations. In Mathematica, for instance, there are quite a few
textual operators that are used in programs. And I've long thought that it would
be very nice to be able to use actual special characters for these, rather than
combinations of ordinary ASCII characters.

It turns out that there's a very smooth way to do that sometimes. Because we
picked the ASCII characters well, one can often get special characters that are
visually very similar but more elegant. For example, if I type - > into
Mathematica, it automatically gets turned into a nice Rule arrow. And what makes
all this work is that the parser for Mathematica can accept both the special
character and non-special character forms of these kinds of operators.

Well, I've often wondered about extensions to this. And gradually they're coming.
Notice the number sign or pounds sign--or is it called octothorp--that we use for
places where parameters go in a pure function. Well, it's bit like a square, just
with some tentacles. And in the future there'll probably be a nice square, with
tiny little serifs, that is the function parameter thing. And it'll look really
smooth, not like a piece of computer language input: more like something iconic.

How far can one go in that direction: making visual or iconic representations of
things? It's pretty clear that things like block diagrams in engineering, or
commutative diagrams in pure mathematics, and flow charts and things work OK. At
least up to a point. But how far can that go?

Well, I'm not sure it can go terribly far. You see, I think one is running into
some fundamental limitations in human linguistic processing.

When languages are more or less context free--more or less structured like trees--
one can do pretty well with them. Our buffer memory of five chunks, or whatever,
seems to do well at allowing us to parse them. Of course, if we have too many
subsidiary clauses, even in a context free language, we tend to run out of stack
space and get confused. But if the stack doesn't get too deep, we do well.

But what about networks? Can we understand arbitrary networks? I mean, why do we
have to have operators that are just prefix, or infix, or overfix, or whatever?
Why not operators that get their arguments by just pulling them in over arcs in
some arbitrary network?

Well, I've been particularly interested in this because I've been doing some
science things with networks. And I'd really like to be able to come up with a
kind of language representation of networks. But even though I've tried pretty
hard, I don't think that at least my brain can deal with networks the way I deal
with things like ordinary language or math that are structured in 1D or 2D in a
context free way. So I think this may be a place where, in a sense, notation just
can't go.

Well, in general, as I mentioned earlier, it's often the case that a language--or
a notation--can limit what one manages to think about.

So what does that mean for mathematics?

Well, in my science project I've ended up developing some major generalizations of

what people ordinarily think of as math. And one question is what notation might
be used to think abstractly about those kinds of things.

Well, I haven't completely solved the problem. But what I've found, at least in
many cases, is that there are pictorial or graphical representations that really
work much better than any ordinary language-like notation.

Actually, bringing us almost back to the beginning of this talk, it's a bit like
what's happened for thousands of years in geometry. In geometry we know how to say
things with diagrams. That's been done since the Babylonians. And a little more
than a hundred years ago, it became clear how to formulate geometrical questions
in algebraic terms.

But actually we still don't know a clean simple way to represent things like
geometrical diagrams in a kind of language-like notation. And my guess is that
actually of all the math-like stuff out there, only a comparatively small fraction
can actually be represented well with language-like notation.

But we as humans really only grock easily this language-like notation. So the
things that can be represented that way are the things we tend to study. Of
course, those may not be the things that happen to be relevant in nature and the
universe.

But that'd be a whole other talk, or much more. So I'd better stop here.

Thank you very much.