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283 points IdealeZahlen | 5 comments | | HN request time: 0s | source
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non- ◴[] No.42139412[source]
One thing I've always struggled with Math is keeping track of symbols I don't know the name of yet.

Googling for "Math squiggle that looks like a cursive P" is not a very elegant or convenient way of learning new symbol names.

I wish every proof or equation came with a little table that gave the English pronunciation and some context for each symbol used.

It would make it a lot easier to look up tutorials & ask questions.

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xg15 ◴[] No.42141247[source]
This. Related to that, I'll also never get used to mathematicians' habit to assign semantic meaning to the font that a letter is drawn in. Thanks to that, we now have R, Bold R, Weirdly Double-Lined R, Fake-Handwritten R, Fraktur R and probably another few more.

All of those you're of course expected to properly distinguish in handwriting.

I'm sure most of them have some sort of canonical name, but I'm usually tempted to read them with different intonations.

(Oh and of course each of those needs a separate Unicode character to preserve the "semantics". Which I imagine is thrilling edgy teenagers in YouTube comments and hackers looking for the next homograph attack)

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1. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.42142964[source]
> I'll also never get used to mathematicians' habit to assign semantic meaning to the font that a letter is drawn in

You never learned to use capital and lowercase letters differently? Why did you capitalize the 'i' in "I'll"?

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2. adammarples ◴[] No.42152937[source]
Case and font are different
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3. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.42152953[source]
How?
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4. adammarples ◴[] No.42164811{3}[source]
Well because I can have upper and lowercase letters in the same font. Aa. Upper and lower cases have different significance, ie. starting letters for honourifics and proper nouns. Unless you want to take a very unconventional view that uppercase is simply a different font from lowercase, which is not how anyone else in the world uses the word.
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5. thaumasiotes ◴[] No.42177023{4}[source]
> Upper and lower cases have different significance

Yes, that's why they're a good example of assigning semantic significance to the font that something is written in.

> Well because I can have upper and lowercase letters in the same font.

What do you think that means?

Try this one: I can have Arial and Calibri letters in the same font.

Where a 'font' is a data file used by word processors to render ASCII or Unicode, it's just as true.

If you think a 'font' means something other than that, what is it, and how does your definition preserve the idea that a capital A and a lowercase a are distinct in some dimension that isn't their 'font'?