Not sure what is the problem here. Even without knowing Greek nor the Greek alphabet, its letters are sufficiently diverse and can be easily told apart.

I can understand emojis can make math more enciting for young children, but if high school+ people cannot get past foreign-looking Greek letters I doubt they would find the motivation to progress much further in understanding the concepts involved.

Are you saying kids will not be able to distinguish between the two symbols? I highly doubt that. They may not remember the names of the symbols, but emojis have the same problem.

I was inclined to agree with you, but then I remembered the zodiac sign emoji. Capricorn is basically η with a looped tail and taurus is gamma ɣ with a bigger loop. I'm pretty sure kids wouldn't be able to write them by hand (neither would I), but they have the advantage that if you type their names on a phone keyboard, you just need to recognize the symbol and tap it. Maybe all that's needed for Greek letters to compete with emoji is equal treatment by keyboards.

The reason the printing press became so revolutionary in latin alphabet using countries even though paper, printing and movable type were invented in China, is because it is very easy to make a machine that uses it. The English alphabet is more or less a common denominator of all other latin alphabet-based languages. Any non-latin/greek/cyrillic script is very hard to adapt to the various forms of technology throughout history.

But both papers illustrate a very real problem. Mathematical notation is horribly, infuriatingly, idiotically overloaded. And, no, context is not enough to divine the meaning. There are plenty of examples where a symbol is used for multiple meanings in the same paper or the same lesson.

My opinion is that the cause of all these problems is a very brain dead decision in math to allow adjacency of symbols to signify multiplication. This results in no longer being able to use multiple character names for things (variables, constants, etc.). And this is crippling. It results in the use of modified characters as symbols, use of characters from other languages as symbols and now the proposal of use of emoji as symbols. Because why not, emoji are plentiful and are now easier to input, store and display than ever.

The same issue (diversity of names) was solved by almost all by having mandatory separator characters(space, tab, comma, semicolon, etc) that are not allowed in names. Imagine a programing language where it is impossible to tell at first glance the meaning of something like "TotalWeight". Is it one variable? Is it Total * Weight? Is it TotalW * eight? Is it Total * W * eight? Is it T * o * t * a * l * W * e * i * g * h * t? We can rewrite this last one as aeghilo(t^2)TW . This is mathematical notation. And it will not change because it is entrenched.

This is like asking why I'm writing in English even though it's not my native language, I do that because almost every educated person understands English, while almost nobody would understand if I wrote in Italian.

Pictograms would be difficult to standardize and hard to reproduce, unless you commit to a small set of them, which would just become an alphabet in disguise.

What if you have two different lengths, one being the distance between two objects and the other being the position of the center of mass over time? What about their two masses? And, in relativity, their two proper times?

Now you're back to using subscripts and the Latin alphabet because what better way to describe the precise object you're talking about in a given language (here: English) than the language itself?

↑ As you would do in programming.

And in case of some languages we can even use the full Unicode for variable names (Julia). The only restriction is we have mandatory separators and adjacency does not automatically mean multiplication.

See for example VS Code Live Share for the last one if you are not aware of it.