Day 1 back at elementary number theory ( day 1155 of sabbatical2, day ~15,547 on earth ). I am revising this slide on the notation for exponentiation and logarithms which I made year ago.
- after a bunch of catch up on software engineering, I am finally turning to focus on remediating my poor foundations in number theory
- a quick look around the internet will show you that this "has always been, and continues to be" an issue for many students of maths; folks also decry other notations like dx/dy, and the visual non-symmetry of notation for differentiation and integration
- I think, a pet idea of mine henceforth will be : someone should make an ISO standard for canonical mathematical notation, and then republish all past mathematical texts ( or have a way of translating them automatically ) to the canonical mathematical notation; all mathematicians would be of course free to use non-ISO notation anywhere they liked. ( oh wait, they've been doing it since 1992, and the latest is here : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_80000 )
TIL :(or am reminded, because I probably forgot) :
- (1) there's an ISO for maths notation, so speculation about notation optimisation should just target that,
- (2) the notion of "antilogs" we studied in highschool are already deprecated in scientific writing,
- (3) the etymology of "logbooks" is the same as that of "knots"
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