3 ms·
Beautiful, elegant, and I disagree it should be taught. ∆ Is used for delta's so frequently that I could see some nasty issues arising in notes for higher leve
by iaw 10y ago
Beautiful, elegant, and I disagree it should be taught.
∆ Is used for delta's so frequently that I could see some nasty issues arising in notes for higher level maths.
I think this could be an excellent teaching tool, to be honest I sometimes pull log notation back into exponential with a variable if I can't remember it immediately, but I think this guy didn't read Feynman's biography where he discusses the problems with creating notation.
- mrob 10y agoδ could be used instead (lowercase delta). Root/exponent/log is so common that it should get priority for the best notation.
- iaw 10y agoI agree in theory, but in practicality I don't. ∆ and δ have distinct and separate meanings in some of my coursework that can't be exchanged. The nomenclature/symbolism is so screwed up in some engineering fields that it would either require all students to revert to the existing symbolism or a level of investment in rewriting literature from research academics that created this screwed system in the first place. I think Feynman had it right, he could invent the best symbols in the world for every operation but no one will use them.
- mcphage 10y agoI don't think this notation would get confused with deltas; how it's used is pretty different, and overloading symbols (especially once you're in higher levels) is common enough.
- iaw 10y agoOverloaded symbols became a nightmare in some of my later undergraduate work. It is not the math classes where I'm worried that this would be a problem, it's in the engineering courses. There's a few situations in mechanics/structures/materials that I can think of where using ∆ instead of the existing 3 notations would become nearly untenable. In these circumstances each "line" of a solution/step usually took the form of more than one page.