Re: [EXTERNAL] Re: a minimal core intent proposal

Hi Murray and Neil,

I agree that we should assemble a complete list with appropriate Unicode
names, and try to keep it sterile from possibly domain-specific assumptions
about what a character may or may not be useful for. Neil used the nice
tagline of "self-describing", which would be a nice aim. I'm happy to offer
help in doing the manual labor collaboratively here.

Nevertheless, I have to disagree about where we draw the lines of what
should and should not be assumed by convention.

If a ℘ is used to mean "weierstrass-p", it really needs an intent
annotation.
"script-capital-p" is the appropriate baseline for higher-education
documents without any intent markup, such as the current state of the arXiv
HTML5+MathML corpus.
Some examples:
- in arXiv:0812.1728, the variable ℘ is a "nonempty collection of subsets"
- in arXiv:1904.08618, the variable ℘ is "an irreducible polynomial of
positive degree"
- in arXiv:2110.06614, the sequence of variables in ℘_1 to ℘_s are "prime
ideals".

Stephen W. offered a lovely list of examples where an msup is not a power.
I will also remind that there are about 40 examples of msup notations that
different from "power" in the current Intent Open spreadsheet.

Any set of defaults that over-asserts its assumptions will be considered as
non-standard in my eyes. Such notation grammars are certainly useful, but
belong under a tight umbrella headings. For example, "℘" defaulting to
"weierstrass-p" is reasonable only in an explicit context of "elliptic
functions".

Greetings,
Deyan


On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 6:36 PM Murray Sargent <
murrays@exchange.microsoft.com> wrote:

> Re speech for Unicode math symbols, their Unicode names provide a useful
> start and may be what we want. But due to stability considerations (Unicode
> names cannot be changed), some names are not what we want. A glaring
> example of this is the Weierstrass p (℘) which has the unfortunate
> Unicode name “SCRIPT CAPITAL P”. It’s neither upper case nor script; it’s
> its own thing, namely Weierstrass p or \wp in TeX. Amusing piece of
> history: in our laser theory papers and books, my physics colleagues and I
> used ℘ as the base of electric-dipole matrix elements and called it
> “squiggle”. It’s #296 in the American Institute of Physics Style Manual.
>
>
>
> I can supply the English names of 360 math symbols that our software
> speaks. There are quite a lot more Unicode math symbols, but they are
> pretty obscure. It’s probably worth creating a complete list. I think I can
> get the names for about 18 other languages as well in case we want to get
> into localization. I also have names for the ~1000 math alphanumerics.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Murray
>
>
>
> *From:* Neil Soiffer <soiffer@alum.mit.edu>
> *Sent:* Thursday, November 10, 2022 2:55 PM
> *To:* David Farmer <farmer@aimath.org>
> *Cc:* www-math@w3.org
> *Subject:* [EXTERNAL] Re: a minimal core intent proposal
>
>
>
> We discussed this some at the meeting this morning. My proposal included a
> statement that there should be a list of common intent names to help
> authoring software know what to do. If is kind of buried at the start of
> the document, so I've added a section calling that out more clearly. For
> Unicode, it does mention that we should provide a default speech (actually
> "meaning") table for Unicode chars typically used in STEM documents.
>
>
>
> I have also added an "Internationalization" section that raises the
> question of  who/what should be responsible for internationalization of
> non-core intents. That includes non-core concepts (in my proposal) for
> things like "absolute-value". I suspect this might be a hot button topic.
>
>
>
>     Neil
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Nov 10, 2022 at 4:26 AM David Farmer <farmer@aimath.org> wrote:
>
>
> Let's consider absolute value.
>
> Is it this document, or somewhere else, that tells me to use
> the string "absolute-value" when I am specifying that?
>
> |X| can also mean determinant, cardinality, order, or length.
> Maybe not all of those are K-12 or K-14, but I think those should
> all be in core because they are reasonably common.  I am suggesting
> that as a general principle.
>
> Similarly, the draft mentions (a,b) as an open interval, but it
> could also be an ordered pair or a point in the Cartesian plane.
>
> Not sure if you are asking for specific instances, but one of my
> go-to examples is the LaTeX \times, which in K-14 can be
> multiplication
> cross product
> "by" as in 3-by-3 matrix or 10-by-12 foot room.
>
> A bit past K-14 it can be direct product or cartesian product,
> so by the principle I suggest above, those intents should also
> be in core.
>
> In biology, × is used to indicate a hybrid of two species, but
> maybe we don't care about that.
>
> On Wed, 9 Nov 2022, Neil Soiffer wrote:
>
> > I wrote a proposal for simplifying what goes into intent core. It ended
> up being sort of an "AT requirements"
> > document for core. If I extend it a little further to include what AT
> should do with "intent" (currently just
> > presumed everyone knows), it would be the basis for an actual AT
> requirements document (or appendix). It also
> > serves to let authors/authoring software know what they can count on as
> default behavior by AT.
> >
> > The proposal contains some open questions, but I believe it is fleshed
> out enough that it is understandable and
> > actionable (let's do this/don't do this). It extends what I put in
> Deyan's intent spreadsheet and also has
> > explanations. It will be the basis for the third agenda item on Thursday.
> >
> >     Neil
> >
> >
> >
>
>