←back to thread

The letter ℘: name and origin? (2017)

(mathoverflow.net)
283 points IdealeZahlen | 1 comments | 14 Nov 24 16:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | source
Show context
non- ◴[14 Nov 24 18:26 UTC] 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.

replies(24): >>42139503 #>>42139508 #>>42139524 #>>42139550 #>>42139564 #>>42139813 #>>42140054 #>>42140141 #>>42140285 #>>42140537 #>>42140722 #>>42140731 #>>42140919 #>>42141247 #>>42141746 #>>42141968 #>>42142338 #>>42143308 #>>42145853 #>>42147470 #>>42148120 #>>42148896 #>>42148973 #>>42149956 #
xg15 ◴[14 Nov 24 21:08 UTC] 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)

replies(4): >>42141452 #>>42142137 #>>42142964 #>>42144033 #
1. card_zero ◴[15 Nov 24 04:44 UTC] No.42144033[source]▶
This is what you get if you insist on using single letters for every variable. Why do that? Well, because otherwise a variable name might be confused with a bunch of variables multiplied together, because we don't use multiplication signs. Why not? Well you see, the signs might be confused with the variable x.