[HN Gopher] Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea
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       Bad but interesting mathematical notation idea
        
       Author : johndcook
       Score  : 55 points
       Date   : 2022-04-19 19:13 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (blog.plover.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (blog.plover.com)
        
       | javajosh wrote:
       | Entertaining bad ideas is one of those secret weapons, I think.
       | So many great ideas come after talking through the implications
       | of the bad idea!
        
         | duxup wrote:
         | "That doesn't work ... but I like that one part." Seems to be
         | the history of invention.
        
       | dmart wrote:
       | An aside, but it's so nice that interesting discussions like the
       | one linked in the article are allowed to bloom on smaller Stack
       | Exchange sites like Mathematics.
       | 
       | I can't imagine a similar sort of rumination surviving on Stack
       | Overflow or Server Fault, but the discussions in that thread are
       | really interesting to read.
        
         | grenoire wrote:
         | My initial reaction was akin to one of the top level comments:
         | These aren't the same, what a silly question!
         | 
         | But as I read through the answers with people simply
         | entertaining it (in a very literal manner), I found myself
         | really questioning it as well. It's odd how different
         | disciplines approach seriousness in their ways.
        
       | melissalobos wrote:
       | One big issue with that notation is that the log of the
       | exponential is not the exponential of the log, so the order
       | really does matter(for any complex valued expressions).
       | 
       | https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=log%28exp%28x%2Biy%29%2...
       | 
       | So just having over and underbars loses some information.
        
       | mongol wrote:
       | I wonder how much difficulty to "get" maths have to do with
       | difficulty to grasp notation conventions. Probably not much in
       | the big picture. But is there some book or dictionary that lays
       | this out in a novel way that makes the reader feel they can
       | understand it superficially?
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | unholiness wrote:
       | This reminds me of a wonderful mathoverflow answer about
       | desirable properties of math notation, authored by none other
       | than Terrance Tao:
       | 
       | https://mathoverflow.net/questions/366070/what-are-the-benef...
        
       | breck wrote:
       | If you find this interesting I'd recommend Florian Cajori's "A
       | History of Mathematical Notations" (1930; I have the 2 volume
       | combined one reprinted in 1993).
        
       | Snawoot wrote:
       | Actually, not bad idea. This one reminds me about Zhegalkin
       | polynomial ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhegalkin_polynomial
       | ), a way to express all boolean functions with minimally
       | sufficient basis: AND and XOR. Such minimal and invariant
       | constructs have some nice properties useful in some class of
       | applications.
        
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