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> I wonder how mathematicians, physicists and engineers come up with names... It might be outsiders view, but I feel like in their formalisms mathematicians fa
by zokier 6y ago
> I wonder how mathematicians, physicists and engineers come up with names...
It might be outsiders view, but I feel like in their formalisms mathematicians fall back to single character "names" for lots of things, or maybe single character + subscript. That conveniently side-steps the issue of naming things, and I think it was what Dijkstra was referring to in his essay.
- snakeboy 6y agoAdditionally, within the scope of any one field or sub-field, you get a nice constant-factor boost by exploiting capital/lowercase, italics, bold-face, "chalkboard" font, etc. and usually that suffices. Anyone who has taken a linear algebra course instantly recognizes what I mean by "Solve Ax = b" in the appropriate context. And if I say "Solve Qx = b" you have even more information, etc.
- andi999 6y agoYes single letters but using greek, latin, fracture, small and capital. Only small fracture is rare though.