Why is math (written) so complex?

It's been ages since I wrote to this particular blog, but rather than make a new blog I'm going to use the existing one to mention some things that are in my mind these days.

We're going to start our series of rants with quaternion rotations. Now if you check the link, you'll find some annoyingly messy (long, error prone to type) formulas for converting a rotation quaternion into a 3x3 rotation matrix. As far as I'm concerned this is yet another perfect example of how people tend to make math unnecessarily cryptic.

Let's assume that we can multiply quaternions and use this to rotate vectors (see the link, it's simple enough). Now if we rotate axial unit vectors (1,0,0), (0,1,0) and (0,0,1) using the quaternion, we end up with a rotated basis that we can turn into a matrix simply by using those rotated vectors as the columns of the new matrix. It so happens that the resulting matrix is the rotation matrix that we want.

Now for efficiency purposes (in code) one might (if you don't trust your compiler's optimizer) want to write out the formulas, so all the products with zero can be dropped and all the products with one skipped and then simplify the remaining stuff a bit... but why do such premature optimizations when writing math for humans to read (as in Wikipedia) is just totally beyond me.

PS. I figured I could take the opportunity to also complain about the general hand-waving about adding scalars and vectors in the above mentioned Wikipedia article. The whole issue could be easily eliminated by defining vector i=(i,j,k) and taking a dot-product with the vector part of the quaternion. Then you'd end up with a+vi which becomes type-safe being all scalars now.