logoalt Hacker News

borracciaBlutoday at 11:58 AM2 repliesview on HN

I was writing a small article about [Set, Set Builder Notation, and Set Comprehension](https://adropincalm.com/blog/set-set-builder-natatio-set-com...) and while i was investigating it surprised me how many different ways are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notation of a Set or a Tuple.

One last rant point is that you don't have "the manual" of math in the very same way you would go on your programming language man page and so there is no single source of truth.

Everybody assumes...


Replies

BlackFingolfintoday at 12:11 PM

I find it strange to compare "math" with one programming language. Mathematics is a huge and diverse field, with many subcommunities and hence also differing notation.

Your rant would be akin to this if the sides are reversed: "It's surprising how many different ways there are to describe the same thing. Eg: see all the notations for dictionaries (hash tables? associative arrays? maps?) or lists (vectors? arrays?).

You don't have "the manual" of programming languages. "

show 2 replies
mzltoday at 12:49 PM

I wrote about overlapping intervals a while ago, and used what I thought was the standard math notation for closed and half-open intervals. From comments, I learned that half-open intervals are written differently in french mathematics: https://lobste.rs/s/cireck/how_check_for_overlapping_interva...