Whether you haven’t done math since high school or consider it your greatest love, you probably still share the experience of having looked at a mathematical equation and being overwhelmed by the dense hodgepodge of symbols. This comes down often to problems with parsing the very compact, context dependent, and not always linear syntax of mathematical notation. This session we will unlearn some of this trauma with an exercise in translating mathematical symbols into a plain English definition and reconstructing mathematical equations as normal sentences. We will then open up the workshop with a few options:

1. Leverage our new definitions to try to find creative expressions of our own thoughts and construct novel equations that to represent them.

2. Go through some famous equations and see if we can translate them to plain English.

3. Come up with our own symbols to express an idea we feel doesn’t yet have a place in mathematics and use it in an equation or expression.

4. Any suggestions are welcome!

For those of you who are experienced and fluent users of math I also think this is a great opportunity to help workshop how we can create more clear and accessible definitions for our mathematical symbols and vocabulary together! Please feel welcome to come as well!