[HN Gopher] Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea ___________________________________________________________________ Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea Author : johndcook Score : 55 points Date : 2022-04-19 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago) (HTM) web link (blog.plover.com) (TXT) w3m dump (blog.plover.com) | javajosh wrote: | Entertaining bad ideas is one of those secret weapons, I think. | So many great ideas come after talking through the implications | of the bad idea! | duxup wrote: | "That doesn't work ... but I like that one part." Seems to be | the history of invention. | dmart wrote: | An aside, but it's so nice that interesting discussions like the | one linked in the article are allowed to bloom on smaller Stack | Exchange sites like Mathematics. | | I can't imagine a similar sort of rumination surviving on Stack | Overflow or Server Fault, but the discussions in that thread are | really interesting to read. | grenoire wrote: | My initial reaction was akin to one of the top level comments: | These aren't the same, what a silly question! | | But as I read through the answers with people simply | entertaining it (in a very literal manner), I found myself | really questioning it as well. It's odd how different | disciplines approach seriousness in their ways. | melissalobos wrote: | One big issue with that notation is that the log of the | exponential is not the exponential of the log, so the order | really does matter(for any complex valued expressions). | | https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=log%28exp%28x%2Biy%29%2... | | So just having over and underbars loses some information. | mongol wrote: | I wonder how much difficulty to "get" maths have to do with | difficulty to grasp notation conventions. Probably not much in | the big picture. But is there some book or dictionary that lays | this out in a novel way that makes the reader feel they can | understand it superficially? | [deleted] | unholiness wrote: | This reminds me of a wonderful mathoverflow answer about | desirable properties of math notation, authored by none other | than Terrance Tao: | | https://mathoverflow.net/questions/366070/what-are-the-benef... | breck wrote: | If you find this interesting I'd recommend Florian Cajori's "A | History of Mathematical Notations" (1930; I have the 2 volume | combined one reprinted in 1993). | Snawoot wrote: | Actually, not bad idea. This one reminds me about Zhegalkin | polynomial ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhegalkin_polynomial | ), a way to express all boolean functions with minimally | sufficient basis: AND and XOR. Such minimal and invariant | constructs have some nice properties useful in some class of | applications. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-04-19 23:00 UTC)