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
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    7
    ·
    11 months 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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      8
      ·
      11 months 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
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        2
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months 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
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      3
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months 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.”

      • Basilisk@mtgzone.com
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        11 months ago

        Q.E.D. is “quod erat demonstrandum”, meaning “thus, it has been demonstrated”.

    • Zyratoxx@lemmy.worldOP
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      11 months 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