Asdwolf

Hey, that's really cool.

I don't have a proper question, just wanted to ask if you ever told him this joke: "What does the B in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stand for?" "I don't know" "Benoit B. Mandelbrot"

I suppose it would wear a little thin. Sorry to have bored you with it again, and thanks for the answer!

It is not a language in the conversational sense, but I imagine what he means is that it is a system for communicating quickly and efficiently. You can write down on one line something which would take a minute to read aloud (there is a lot of shorthand), and could take days to think of. But it's understood quickly and easily by anyone familiar with the notation.

There are shorthands for all sorts of things, such as "There exists", "for all", "unique", "is a member of", "therefore", "because", "without loss of generality", "contradiction", "end of proof/QED".

Often, whole proofs are condensed into a line or two, which leave the reader to reconstruct it completely - you might say "lemma 2.3 is proved trivially by induction", instead of writing out an easy but long page of working.

Basically, mathematical notation is a great language for maths, and it's certainly something you can gain fluency in and have to learn by practicing. But it's not a language of the sort that a linguist would care about.