About the importance of notation

Food for thought to all PhD students writing their thesis as a collage of different papers with heterogenous notation…

This was the opinion of the mathematician Polya about the importance of notation: “An important step in solving a problem is to choose the notation. It should be done carefully. The time we spend now on choosing notation may well be repaid by the time we save later by avoiding hesitation and confusion. . . . A good notation should be unambiguous, pregnant, easy to remember; it should avoid harmful second meanings, and take advantage of useful second meanings; the order and connection of signs should suggest the order and connection of things.” (excerpt from Causal Inference of P.R. Rosenbaum)