Timeline for Does the usage of mathematical symbols work differently in books than in theses?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
6 events
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| May 17, 2019 at 8:58 | comment | added | user2768 | @opa You've quoted me out of context, the very next sentence starts "However, ..." Anyhow, I appreciate your concerns, but I'm inclined to agree with MPW and Vladimir, especially "it is quite common to use tau for any kind of stress." Of course, it really is case dependent, that is, in some cases it may be okay (because the discipline does it that way, for instance), whereas in others it might not. | |
| May 17, 2019 at 6:34 | comment | added | Vladimir F Героям слава | @opa In this case it is quite common to use tau for any kind of stress. I would certainly be confused if the stress wasn't denoted by a tau. Look into Pope's Turbulent flows what kind of symbols they had to employ to stay unique in the whole book but still I expect he uses some kind of tau for these two stresses. The book uses the same letters with many different typefaces for various variables, because the number of symbols is limited. | |
| May 16, 2019 at 21:51 | comment | added | MPW | @opa : In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with using the same symbol to mean different things in different contexts, especially if they are analogous. When a student has 15 equations to solve on a test, all involving the variable x, do you think the student is confused because x appears several times in different contexts? Of course not. And if the author actually simply mentions that the symbol means this or that when it is about to be used, what's the problem? | |
| May 16, 2019 at 18:15 | comment | added | Krupip |
"This seems reasonable." No, it's not, and academics, and indeed any one hoping to get an idea across, need to stick with a consistent method for describing different phenomena, constants and variables. It is not reasonable to basically require you to keep looking back a the beginning of a chapter in a book to determine the symbology, even given you understand what each symbol should represent normally. The book made a mistake in overloading symbols like that.
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| May 16, 2019 at 17:32 | comment | added | Solar Mike | Using the same symbol with two different meanings in two different chapters does seem to increase the possibilities of confusion... | |
| May 16, 2019 at 12:13 | history | answered | user2768 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |