This reminds me of a story that a CS major friend told me: she and a bunch of others had ran into sum notation earlier in some math classes, but hadn’t quite understood how it should be interpreted… until they were taking a CS class, where the TA noticed that they seemed to be confused about it.
The TA was like, “well, you guys know for loops, right?”
Them: ”… yes …”
The TA: “Okay, so if you’ve got ∑5n=1n for example, then you could read that as x = 0; for (int n = 1; n ⇐ 5; n++){x = x + n}; return x”
This reminds me of a story that a CS major friend told me: she and a bunch of others had ran into sum notation earlier in some math classes, but hadn’t quite understood how it should be interpreted… until they were taking a CS class, where the TA noticed that they seemed to be confused about it.
The TA was like, “well, you guys know for loops, right?”
Them: ”… yes …”
The TA: “Okay, so if you’ve got ∑5n=1n for example, then you could read that as x = 0; for (int n = 1; n ⇐ 5; n++){x = x + n}; return x”
Them: “OOOOOOOH”