Mathematical Notations -- Terence Tao's perspective

Hi everyone,

This post is directed at the "semantics for accessibility" side of our
discussions, triggered by daily news.

Very surprisingly, tonight's top-trending HackerNews post is a
lengthy, and insightful, discussion on mathematical notations by
Terrence Tao, as part of a StackOverflow answer[1]. It is worth
reading in depth both for his general principles and the wonderful
enumeration of 15 different notations with which practitioners write
(or used to write) inner products.

I think a lot of our group's members will find themselves nodding
along on the principles, though I am certain there is a lot of
subjective preference there as well. And I personally found a good
handful of the notations completely novel to me (e.g. Hodge, geometric
algebra, musical notation).

As the general rule goes, the actual HackerNews comments are a little
less insightful than the article, but I feel obliged to share the link
where I discovered this as well [2].

I think this post is quite timely and can add extra substance to our
example-driven discussions.

[1] StackOverflow answer:
https://mathoverflow.net/questions/366070/what-are-the-benefits-of-writing-vector-inner-products-as-langle-u-v-rangle/366118#366118

[2] HackerNews discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23911903


Enjoy,
Deyan

Received on Wednesday, 22 July 2020 02:05:25 UTC