Do you spell out Thm., Prop., Eq., Ch. in mathematical papers?

Question

Just as the title says: do you spell out Thm., Prop., Eq., Ch. and comparable abbreviations in a mathematical paper?

I suppose that, if in doubt, it is always best to stay consistent (in whatever way) throughout ones writing for the least. Do journals have (different) policies on this, or is there a prefered style when in doubt?

Answer 1

It is a matter of style. I would say yes, expand them. In my opinion, authors tend to over-abbreviate making documents harder to read. For instance, I can't work out what you mean by Ch. (Conjechure?)

Answer 2

In my experience, authors almost always spell out words like "Theorem", "Proposition", and so on. I expect that journal styles will generally require this. I can't remember the last time I saw a published paper that abbreviated them.

But if you're writing a paper, you must have read a lot of other people's published papers. Surely by now you've formed your own opinion of the consensus?

Answer 3

To expand on Dave's answer slightly, abbreviations should follow the guidelines of the specific venue to which you are sending a paper. If they expect no abbreviations, don't use them. If they have standard ones specified, use those as appropriate. Typically, I would only use something like "Prop." for "proposition" when it's referring to something with a specific number, and that's what the style guide calls for.

Other abbreviations should be used to improve readability: for instance writing out "fast Fourier transform" one hundred times during a paper can start to get more tedious than using "FFT" as an abbreviation. But shortening individual words should only be done if it makes reading the paper easier, not simply to shorten it.

Answer 4

One heuristic is to write things as you would read them out loud. In other words, don't try to save space in print unless you would use the same abbreviation in speech.

For example, I'm happy to say "i.e." or "e.g." orally in certain situations, so those abbreviations can be fine (indeed, it would sound really weird if you wrote "id est" or "exempli gratia"), but I would never refer to "Sec. 5" or "Eq. 3" when speaking. Trying to pronounce "Ch. 2" as written would be even worse. By this standard, abbreviations like NASA or FFT are OK, although they can of course be overused and they may be more cryptic than the writer intends.

This principle extends beyond abbreviations: try not to write anything that would be awkward to read aloud. (For example, mathematicians sometimes violate this by juxtaposing formulas with no words in between them.) Of course this is not an absolute rule, but following it will generally make your papers easier and more pleasant to read. The effects are admittedly small, but if you are explaining complicated or subtle ideas, you shouldn't add to the difficulties with clumsy writing.

Answer 5

Well, yes, you in general spell out these words. However, there are basically three types of their usage and you can draw the line between Abbr./Spell-out any where between them.

1. In-text usage at the beginning of a sentence. Theorem 3.5 clearly shows that Foo is actually a Bar of chocolate. Equation 3.17 confirms this. Equation (3.18) is irrelevant.

2. In-text usage in the middle of a sentence. We see in Thm. 3.5 that Foo is actually a Bar of chocolate, which is confirmed by Eq. (3.17), noting that (3.18) is irrelevant.

3. Parenthesized usage. We see that Foo is actually a Bar of chocolate (Thm. 3.5).

(I personally prefer no abbreviation for any references, and omitting the word "Equation" whenever possible, but that's not the point.) The point is that you should draw the line somewhere and be consistent throughout your document, and especially be consistent with "Fig." vs. "Table" etc. The exceptional things are:

• Equations with 5 (five!!!) possible styles: Equation (3.18), Equation 3.18, Eq. (3.18), Eq. 3.18, (3.18).
• Bibliographic citations which usually have a prescribed style and you should only be consistent in whether they can be a grammatical object in the sentence or not.
• Chapters/sections, where: first you don't need to follow the LaTeX's terminology, and second you can use the sign "§" for them.

Answer 6

In a mathematics paper, Prop can only mean Proposition, unless it's something strange about the mathematics of plays or more likely propellers, in which case "prop 3" might mean the third stage prop or propeller. Same for Fig unless it's something strange about the mathematics of fruits, or Def unless it's a statistical analysis of larg-intestinal flora. But Theorem is short enough already. Significantly shorter seems OK unless it's atypical or otherwise ambiguous!