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In one of Feynman's books he talks about a notation he tried to introduce but couldn't get to stick. He particularly disliked sin^-1 as arcsine, it looked to ho
by gweinberg 5y ago
In one of Feynman's books he talks about a notation he tried to introduce but couldn't get to stick. He particularly disliked sin^-1 as arcsine, it looked to home like 1/sin. His idea was to use σ (lower case sigma) for sin with the dash at the top extending over the thing to be sined and a similar symbol with the dash extending backwards for arcsine. It sounded like a great idea to me, and I I would be pushing for it if I ever used trigonometric functions in the first place.
- mjd 5y agoIt's nice to be reminded that not everyone has good ideas all the time, not even Feynman.
- d_tr 5y agoI laughed with your comment, thanks :). I do not think it is a good idea either, because what would we do with cos, tan and so on? Maybe it seemed good to Feynman because of his unique way of parsing mathematical expressions?
- ranko 5y agoI think that's in "Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman". As I recall, he gave up on it because no-one else could understand him - notation is both a tool of thought and of communication with others. A similar idea is Abelson's (I think) remark about writing code for people and only incidentally for machines.