Pros and cons of including mathematical equations in presentation slides As a researcher in CS, I give often presentations, where I always ask about the feedback from my colleagues. I personally don't like to put equations in my slides because I believe that nobody will have enough time to read the understand the equation (especially because in CS the equation is a tool to solve the problem and not the heart of the topic). Instead, I enrich the slides with intuitive figures and demonstrations. I've heard some professors encouraging the same approach, but in my current group, my professor and my colleagues believe that equations illustrate the complexity of the method and we should put them.

I don't think this is a question of preference, therefore, I would like to have more opinions about putting or not putting equations in presentation slides and why.
You are starting from the wrong point if you are asking the question of whether to use formulas in isolation.

When you write a presentation, a paper, a proposal, an expose, or anything else, here are two questions you should ask yourself:


Who is my audience? What is their prior knowledge? Why are they there and what are their motivations for attending/reading? What do they want to take away from you provide them with?
What is my own motivation? Do I want to teach them something new? Do I want to illustrate how smart I am? Do I want to give an overview of a field that everyone in the audience should understand, or do I want to impress a few key people?


If you have answers to these questions, then (and only then) should you start writing. You will find that, maybe unsurprisingly, the question of whether to use formulas will have different answers depending on your audience and what you want to achieve. If you are giving a job talk and you want to provide depth to your talk, then formulas are probably a fine approach. If you are giving a department colloquium that should have broad appeal to grad students and professors alike, then maybe using words instead of formulas is the better approach.

The point is: It all depends -- on the audience and what you want to achieve.