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#notation

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Hear me out. Mathematicians should adopt Futhark (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runes#Fu)

Mathematicians want new symbols like magpies want shiny things. Runes have the advantages that

1. There are not too many of them at around 24 depending on flavour.

2. Many of them correspond to a latin character in a relatively straightforward way, allowing for an additional "sort" of variables per context.

3. They can be drawn with straight lines in a way that is clear at a range of font sizes and are forgiving to those with poor handwriting (I'm looking at you, ξ)

4. They come from a dead language, so who's going to complain other than old norse specialists.

This handles many of the disadvantages of say:
Chinese characters (too many, and I know over 2000)
Hangul / Kana / etc. (multiple sensible choices for a given consonant)
Hebrew / other abjads (none that correspond to vowels)

Some problems:
1. Basically none of you know them. Consult your local tiktok fortune teller for a brief intro

2. The standard futhark order does not really correspond to latin/greek order

Edit: 3. Poor font support for Runes. They are at least assigned standard unicode codepoints in the Runic block, so this could be mitigated over time. In tex there is the "allrunes" package at least, although I have never tried it.

(This isn't a shitpost, I've brought this up at least four times this week already at MGS)

en.wikipedia.orgRunes - Wikipedia

Revolut°Permanente🚩 « Concrètement, c'est pour affiner les rangs » : À Aix-Marseille, la réforme de notation accélère la sélection: Cette année, un nouveau système de notation, via des « blocs de compétences », vient durcir les conditions d'obtention du diplôme et augmente le stress étudiant. Un bouleversement volontairement opaque qui vise à accélérer la sélection.Jeunesse / Sélection à l'université /… revolutionpermanente.fr/Concre 🚩RP #Éducation #Université #RéformeÉducative #Étudiants #Notation

Why don't we write the logarithm like this? It feels like teaching students what logarithms are is way more painful than teaching roots, but this notation emphasizes that they are perfectly analogous.

I can provide my rough source for this if people are interested.

TIL: "The use of the symbol ∈ (a stylized form of the Greek epsilon) to denote membership was initiated by the Italian mathematician Giuseppe Peano in 1889. It abbreviates the Greek word ἐστί, which means "is". The underlying rationale is illustrated by the fact that if 𝐵 is the set of all blue objects, then we write "𝑥∈𝐵" in order to assert that 𝑥 is blue."
- Enderton, Elements of set theory

Every now and again I get annoyed that we write the name of the function before the thing it's applied to.

I'd like it the other way round, so that as you read left to right, you read the story of what happens to the input value.

To evaluate 𝑓(𝑔(𝑥)), I have to scan all the way to to the right, then work my way back to the left, first applying 𝑔 and then 𝑓 .
I'd prefer to read ((𝑥)𝑔)𝑓.

"But it's called 'f of x'," you cry.

Yeah, but it doesn't have to be, pal!

Why not "x's f"?