Comments on: How To Write Mathematics Badly 3

By: beans

beans — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 21:31:42 +0000

Grrr, I had ‘forgotten’ to answer the question and hence lost my reply!!

Adeel: I was just asking whether Steve would know it I had done the sum incorrectly! :p

BTW Steve, that’s not fair! I haven’t done them yet, although it’s a good plan if you want me to shut my yap!

By: steve

steve — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:28:35 +0000

Very tempting to ask instead for a solution to the partial differential equation

By: Adeel Khan

Adeel Khan — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 15:05:18 +0000

Whoa nice new theme.

@beans: the reason it asks you to do the sum is to prevent automatic spamming by bots.

By: beans

beans — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 12:49:31 +0000

I think I’ll stick with the three dots as well! I normally use that symbol for iff, but I guess you have a fair point about using ‘iff’ in sentences! So in theorems or proofs, it’s best to write it out in full I suppose. (I got a big fat circle around iff on my work!)

Grrr, I can’t even write s.t anymore! (It’s all for the best, but its much quicker to just write iff and s.t!)

By: steve

steve — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 10:29:27 +0000

Beans: I often use but it seems to be going out of fashion. Similarly I use instead of iff which I think looks nicer. But if you are writing words rather than sentences it is better to use if and only if otherwise it begins to look a bit like txt spk

So I would write , or is a solution of the equation if and only if .

By: MIke

MIke — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 01:41:22 +0000

Hey, the layout has changed, very nice.

By: beans

beans — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:16:09 +0000

Forgot to mention- like the new look. It’s cool! (and would you ever know if we do the sums that it asks us to do incorrectly??!! )

By: beans

beans — Sat, 17 Mar 2007 00:14:34 +0000

I’m guilty of a few/most of the examples that you have mentioned! (especially the proof one!) Although, now I had learnt that if you do have the quadratic and want to solve it, you don’t use the equals sign but iff!

I guess I’ve had that ‘habit’ since school. But I haven’t actually got the grasps of proofs yet (still waiting to one day waking up and being able to do them!).

Just wondering- is there anything wrong with using the three dots for therefore, and writing ‘iff’ instead of ‘if and only if’?