I am reading a book. One of the characters studied physics, which makes me wonder about him, but his focus is astronomy, which is a useless as my pure math degrees, so I warmed to him somewhat.
So character (his name is Nick) thinks about math. Nick thinks about equations. The author decides to write these equations out for us, and we get
Perhaps one is thinking that I do not have $latex \LaTeX$ installed in wordpress and am typing out what the math should be. All that is wrong. Of course I have $latex \LaTeX$ installed with wordpress. In fact, $latex \LaTeX$ comes pre-installed with more versions of wordpress. Secondly, I would have put the slashes, underbars, carots, etc, probably a text box for the for. No, this is, verbatim, what was written on the page, assuming I transcribed the brackets correctly.
Maybe Nick thinks in $latex \LaTeX$-esque thoughts? The book is set in the early eighties, so we’ll reduce that to TeX thoughts? But he isn’t attached to a university, so is that likely? Moreover, in thinking, would someone think sqrt instead of $latex \sqrt{\,}$? I wouldn’t.
So I come to the conclusion that the typesetter and the copy-readers don’t really know how equations work, how equation-thinking people think of equations. I assume this is a real astronomy equation. I assume that the author copied it down from a textbook or paper, where it was written, I assume as:
Perhaps not exactly that (I haven’t taken physics since high school, a class in which a ninety percent of our work was determining what a Newton scale would read while it held a variety of weights while going up and down at certain speeds on an elevator) but something similar. But I cannot imagine that the author found an equation written as it ended up in her book in a scientific setting. Instead, somehow, via editors and typesetters and copy-readers, we got from the second equation to the first one, probably either under the assumption that the first is more palatable for a non-science audience or via a typesetter who had never seen how to typeset mathematics before.
Either way, this made me unhappy or angry or something in between.