Notation decides what’s easy to think

Try long division in Roman numerals. The algorithm isn’t harder, the notation just won’t hold the intermediate state.

Leibniz’s dy/dx against Newton’s dots is the stock example — same calculus, one of them makes the chain rule look like cancelling fractions. Notation gets treated as packaging and it’s often doing the work.

Chess notation, chemical formulae, knitting patterns. All of them doing more work than they get credit for.