Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now

  • Solivine@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    If that annoys you, never get into advanced maths. There’s arbitrary symbols that make no sense like 3 dots in a triangle means therefore. An upside down capital A means for all.

    • theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      1 year ago

      I still use the three dots for therefore sometimes without really thinking about it. I never pursued work in maths or physics (I set and run industrial machines) but for some reason that one always stuck with me from school.

      • ActionHank@sopuli.xyz
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        1 year ago

        I just use TF as i need it all the time for notes and stuff, but really wish I could use the 3 triangle dots, which I learned to use in logic. I wish the emoji picker (ctrl+period) could accept a searches for more symbols. On windows a search for the cucumber emoji works, but you can’t search for greek letters. sigh

    • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      Mathematicians didn’t want to write a conclusion paragraph to their proofs to say that that result proves what they wanted to show, so they just put “QED” at the end which is some Latin/Greek phrase to the effect.

      Then they got too lazy to write that because they do proofs all the time, so they just put a box ∎ that means “so, basically yeah. there you have it.”

    • Zyratoxx@lemmy.worldOP
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      1 year ago

      Yeah, I’ve got “Advanced Mathematics” as a university lecture and some students made a glossary to understand what tf the prof is writing