Xah's Edu Corner: The importance of syntax & notations.

[Xah Lee]

2009-08-17

On Aug 16, 10:32 pm, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally, particular interesting info i've learned is that, for all
> my trouble in the past decade expressing problems of traditional math
> notation, i learned from his article this single-phrase summary:
> “traditional math notation lacks a grammar”.

> The article is somewhat disappointing though. I was expecting he'd go
> into some details about the science of math notations, or, as he put
> it aptly: “linguistics of math notations”. However, he didn't touch
> the subject, except saying that it haven't been studied.

upon a more detailed reading of Stephen's article, i discovered some
errors.

On this page:
http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/mathml/mathml2.html

he mentions the Plimpton 322 tablet. It is widely taught in math
history books, that this table is pythagorean triples.

On reading his article, i wanted to refresh my understanding of the
subject, so i looked up Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plimpton_322

and behold!

apparantly, in recent academic publications, it is suggested that this
is not pythagorean triples, but rather: “a list of regular reciprocal
pairs”.

  Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

On Aug 15, 10:54 pm, Xah Lee <xah... at gmail.com> wrote:
> Xah's Edu Corner: The importance of syntax & notations.

>http://www.stephenwolfram.com/publications/recent/mathml/mathml_abstr...

> this article should teach the coding sophomorons and computer
> “science” idiotic authors who harbor the notion that syntax is not
> important, picked up by all the elite i-reddit & twittering &  hacker
> news am-hip dunces.

> Further readings:

> • The TeX Pestilence
>  http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/TeX_pestilence.html

> • A Notation for Plane Geometry
>  http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/plane_geometry_notation.html

> • The Concepts and Confusions of Prefix, Infix, Postfix and Fully
> Nested Notations
>  http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/notations.html

> • The Problems of Traditional Math Notation
>  http://xahlee.org/cmaci/notation/trad_math_notation.html