I cannot now recall how my Googling led me last week to Mathematical Writing by Donald E. Knuth, Tracy Larrabee, and Paul M. Roberts – a report based on a course of the same name given at Stanford University during autumn quarter, 1987. It is not as if I do any of that.
However I was intrigued to see the following, very early on, #3 in a list of 27 points considered to be especially important:
Don't use the symbols ; replace them by the corresponding words. (Except in works on logic, of course.)
I don’t suppose those 5 proscribed symbols come out on the blog – I had to use Word’s Font → Symbol → Insert → Symbol to get them in since a copy & paste from the PDF did not work.
I shall not disgrace myself by trying to name all 5; I think I recognise 3, but have no recollection of ever having seen the fourth. It is, after all, (gulp) now half a century since I had to try to force anything of the sort into my reluctant brain.The first one in the list is however was engraved in childhood & would be familiar to anyone who did old fashioned school geometry – the triangle made up of three full stops, which means therefore.
It is a source of great frustration to me that the instructor did not see fit to explain this ban.
Links
Mathematical writing
Earliest
Uses of Symbols of Set Theory and Logic
Related post
Wherefore therefore?
