I'm with Gauss here

By -
"sin2θ is odious to me, even though Laplace made use of it; should it be feared that might become ambiguous, which would perhaps never occur... well then, let us write (sin θ)2, but not sin2θ, which by analogy should signify sin(sin θ)." -- Gauss-Schumacher correspondence, quoted in Eli Maor, Trigonometric Delights.

This must be one of the worst notational choices in mathematics.

Comments

  1. shonk7:06 PM

    Agreed. Yet another example of the evils that follow from mathematicians' laziness about writing parentheses.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. scineram11:05 AM

      They aren't going to help if we are only interested in pure functions. If someone wants the derivative of Sin^2, parentheses won't resolve the ambiguity that is the root of the problem.

      Delete
    2. shonk12:07 AM

      Writing sin^2 is way worse than writing sin^2 x.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more