Symbols

In my macroeconomics course, the professor was presenting the concept of capital and its effect on the steady state output be writing the following equation on the board (for those who must know, it simply says the change in capital is equal to Investment in new capital less the portion of old capital which is no longer functioning):

Immediately one of the business students asked, "What's that?" pointing at the offending squiggle preceding the final K.

"That's a delta; it symbolizes the depreciation rate."

"Can I just write a 'd'?"

"No, it's a delta. D is used elsewhere."

"Are you sure? It looks like a 'd'."

He'd obviously argue that we use too many symbols. I on the other hand intend to demonstrate we have far too few.

Take for example this little Greek letter: . To a mathematician that means the ratio between the diameter to the circumference of a circle. To a Greek that's a 'p' sound. To a micro-economist it's profit, to a macro-economist, inflation. A physicist will tell you it's half of a waveform, but for a theoretical physicist it's an unstable combination of a quark and an anti-quark. It means a round fruit-filled confection to a chef. And to an engineer is just means three.

I thought at the very least we could use superscripts or subscripts. Such as the engineering version of pi would be . Sadly, that already has a meaning: you've memorized Euler's identity backwards. And no one wants to carry around a dozen colored pencils to color-code their constants. The only logical solution is more symbols.

Hebrew and Cyrillic would make a good start, but I'd recommend going all the way to a system similar to Chinese characters or the Mayan script. The symbols would each convey enough information that you could guess at their meaning. For example, the value 9.8 might be a doodle of a falling rock and an earth with the letters SI in the background.

And just think of what this would mean for the advancement of computer technology. We'd actually have a reason to use Unicode and 16-bit characters.