The most widely used and influential notation is writing systems for natural languages. It’s tempting to imagine spoken and written language as two sides of the same coin, but writing down spoken language changes our relationship to language and to our ideas. Spoken language is useful for communicating in small groups, and perhaps for thinking aloud. When we write ideas down, we make those ideas durable and reliable through time. This difference also delineates the shift from oral to written tradition in history. All of science, all of literature, all of trade and politics are built on top of the fact that we can write down an idea, and expect it not to change over time. When we record events in writing, we can have a coherent idea of facts as something separate from simply what we say, which might fade with our memories.

— Linus Lee, Notational intelligence