3 ms·

I think this is an exaggeration/strawman. Can you give an example of a mainstream introductory math book that defines some esoteric notation like "Q(x)" and the

I think this is an exaggeration/strawman. Can you give an example of a mainstream introductory math book that defines some esoteric notation like "Q(x)" and then continues using it hundreds of pages later? Note that I don't mean defining it locally within the context of one proof -- that's something different. The closest thing I can think of is notations like U(f, P) and L(f, P) for the upper and lower Riemann sums of a function f with respect to a partition P. These do show up in introductory real analysis textbooks, but they're pretty basic/fundamental notions. By the way, as far as I know, ∂ in introductory textbooks can only mean either "partial derivative" or "boundary". Do you have examples of it meaning other things?

jacques_chester 8y ago
Most of what I've seen lately is queueing theory, markov processes or statistics, and yes, I have seen notation used for hundreds of pages at a time and I've seen these symbols used to mean different things (not including partial differential). One of the books I read recently[0] has a table of where symbols and formulae are first defined. It's a godsend. But I would prefer self-describing names to a lookup table. I don't put comments at the top of each file of code with such a table. [0] https://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0073401323/information_center_view0/index.html https://highered.mheducation.com/sites/0073401323/informatio...