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I suppose it's fine.
@futurebird @EverydayMoggie my kids sign like they don't know cursive and while I smile in pleasure to see my kids writing, they are pretty lame signatures. My applied math teacher has a good spiel about making ones handwriting be super consistent and legible as a practice to reduce maths errors. (My own rate of success on a long PDE being less than fifty percent going to the class).
Few people realize how crazy math is about symbols and hand writing.
For example if your write your Xs so they look like the cross product symbol. Please do not. 'a' is NOT the same letter as 'A' it's really crazy and often glossed over harming students.
@futurebird @EverydayMoggie I have been doing sets where there is a lower case t, a capital T and a Greek tau. I have to stay careful the whole time.
I guess I should post the page from my stats textbook where the letter 'c' is used in three different ways.
@futurebird @EverydayMoggie standardly you would write the fancy C with curlicues top and bottom in hand written notes. I take the point tho. And I must argue with the biology person you can't read any biology without being expected to remember so much arbitrary data about species or chemicals or cell types or who even knows. I can remember what the fancy C is for but I cannot remember 20 some amino acids much less five kingdoms and 70 clades and 150 receptor subtypes.
but the vast bulk of math i only learned from programming (i did take some advanced math classes in HS and somehow didn't flunk out, but i never touched any of it after i didn't-flunk-out of the classes in question for reasons some of which i only became conscious of while writing this) so my starting point is that the vast majority of stuff can eventually somehow be expressed in ascii
@futurebird @jayalane @EverydayMoggie I had to change my handwriting when I started to get into symbol heavy areas. z printed with a cross bar to distinguish from 2. My cursive z was getting confused with both y and zeta.
@Rivikah @futurebird @EverydayMoggie I also find if I don't focus I might randomly rotate my x's a bit so they look like t's.
@futurebird @jayalane @EverydayMoggie also, the way you can make an experienced mathematician's head hurt by using x as an integer, or swapping i and n in a ∑ or ∏ expression (0 ≤ n ≤ i makes my eyes water just writing it).
@futurebird @jayalane @EverydayMoggie
1/2
my fifth grade algebra teacher actually made us practice "100 times each" a whole list of math-specific handwriting things, like "for negative numbers, the negative sign must be clearly and consistently higher than the subtraction sign, and shorter than the subtraction sign",
@futurebird @jayalane @EverydayMoggie
2/2
"the radical must be drawn with these precisee strokes", and "these are the precise strokes you must use for greek letters α, β, γ, etc". I had terrible motor co-ordination (and never really learned to write readable cursive), and it was the hardest thing I ever did in math.
@llewelly Yikes.I'd never have gotten anywhere with a teacher like that. My printing is legible on a good day, &, uh, let's not drag my cursive into this.
@Gorfram
I have complicated feelings about it. On the one hand, I could totally understand how it would have driven some away from math forever, and in my own case, it probably amplified my "do as much as possible in my head" approach to math, but in college it saved me because there were many times when my class notes were totally unreadable expect for the math, which was neat. Though it probably skipped too many steps for most people.
@llewelly Mine saved me a bit, I think.
We used to get the answers along with problem statement, and the deal was to show how you got from the one to the other. These were not easy problems.
When I was really stuck, sometimes I would work backwards from the solution on a piece of scratch until I got stuck again. Then I'd copy over my backwards equations, in reverse order, onto my homework paper under my real work. I think my tortured writing was a factor in me never getting caught, & these problems being handed back marked "correct."
So now you know how I cheated my way through college. 
@Gorfram @llewelly I took a class where most people turned homework in handwritten but all my other classes required latex so I just did it in latex. Then one set, I was on the train and noticed I had skipped a problem so I did it with nice pen and ink and the professor gave zero points for it - just "I can't get anything from this".
@futurebird @jayalane @EverydayMoggie I developed my handwriting style as an undergraduate in physics. Still with me except for a few slight modifications taken from the Palm touchscreen style.
@jhavok @futurebird @EverydayMoggie it totally makes sense as an applied math behavior. I am taking PDEs now, wave equation this week, and omg it isn't just a diffEq it's like ten diffEqs per homework. Homogeneous, steady state, separation of variables, integration by parts for the Fourier series for IC, and one little sign error kills everything. And you have to be sitting at the paper to work in it (for me as not Gauss :) pure maths at lest I can dream about it and think about it continually