Talk:Glossary of mathematical symbols

Page was much more legible before the merge

I have been using "List of mathematical symbols by subject" as a reference for several years. I have some feedback on the recent merge:

• "Glossary of mathematical symbols" contains much less information relevant (e.g. LaTeX code). The summary of the symbols isn't all that helpful because I could always click on the hyperlink to see a summary of the symbol at the top of the relevant page.

• The inconsistent spacing between symbols when scrolling by eye makes it much harder to visually identify a symbol about which one potentially has no information other than the visual appearance.

• The typesetting of operators and symbols alongside text is very messy and the article in general does not look professional. I would recommend at least setting individual symbols in-line with their text.

• Entries such as:

□(□)
□(□, □)
□(□, ..., □)

are ambiguous. Is this all one object or three examples?

• The section/sub-section structure is less useful. Why does 'calculus' have no subsections while 'brackets' does? The structure was more useable when it was more granular but with effective high-level section headings.

• There is less information on the new page.

I appreciate what this merge was attempting to do, but as it is this page seems to serve a difference purpose than that from before. Personally, I will replace my bookmark to direct me to the historical page, as that was much more useful. HyadesHoliday (talk) 17:20, 25 March 2024 (UTC)

I strongly agree with this opinion. I also have been using Symbols by Subject for the Latex codes, and after the merge, it has become much more difficult to find the code for the symbol. Additionally, I agree it is inconvenient to read which symbols were better when they were displayed on the tables. And I agree that this merged article seems to serve a different purpose than the Symbols by Subject. This became very less useful for me. 59.7.50.242 (talk) 01:44, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

This article is for general use, not for Wikipedia editors or typographers. As said in the introduction, it suffices to read the source of the article to know latex codes, and this should be easy for a Wikipedia editor. Otherwise said, the article is about the mathematical meaning of the symbols, not about their typography. Possibly, the latex code and the Unicode name could be added in the {{term}} fields, but I am not sure that this would be an improvement. In any case this would require a consensus here. D.Lazard (talk) 09:14, 1 April 2024 (UTC)

@D.Lazard I am not sure what side you are coming down on here; I am a general-use user as I was using the merged page to write a thesis in computer science, not Wikipedia articles. I should not need to inspect the source of an article in order to find out relevant information. For this purpose the merged page was much more useful. We are all agreed that this article is about the mathematical meaning, not the typography - however this is why the merged page served a distinct function and should have been kept separate. In any case, legibility is the greatest part of understanding and in that regard the merged page was more useful as it was much easier to read and the links to the relevant (and complete!) descriptions, as contained within the dedicated Wikipedia pages for each symbol, were easy to identify. Not to mention that there remains many more symbols on the merged page than on the current one, so however one looks at it, information has been lost. HyadesHoliday (talk) 14:29, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

See Wikipedia is not a manual. The purpose of the article is to explain mathematical notation. It is not its function to tell you how to write LaTeX. There are many (better) resources for that. It is as undue to include it as it would be to derive one of the functions it describes. 𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 17:09, 2 April 2024 (UTC)

"Wikipedia is not a manual" does not apply here because simply using some functionality for a practical purpose does not mean that functionality is "manual-like". There are many useful mathematical and physical articles on Wikipedia that I have used for references for equations and so on in the past, but no-one would argue that the inclusion of, for example, F=ma in an article about Newtonian force is inappropriate because "wikipedia is not a manual", because F=ma is a relevant piece of information for the subject. Likewise, in an article about a symbol it is relevant to include common encodings of that symbol. If you disagree, consider that any decent article for a mathematical symbol includes the unicode and LaTeX for that symbol, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equals_sign#Not_equal, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turned_A, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_symbol. Should we remove the TeX from those as well?

Anyway I think we agree that he article is to explain mathematical notation, which, again, is why having a separate page with LaTeX and so on was so helpful. Besides, if the merge could be undone, and the LaTeX removed, that would at least address five of my six complaints with this merged page (although, again, I don't see why such functionality should be removed). HyadesHoliday (talk) 11:47, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

For the latex syntax of those Latex symbols that are available in Wikipedia, see Help:FORMULA#Formatting using LaTeX. For HTML symbols, see Help:FORMULA#HTML entities. D.Lazard (talk) 15:17, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

As a holding position, the last version of the list article is here, so you can at least get on with writing your thesis. I realise that this doesn't help anyone else, so a more sustainable solution is needed. Could the LaTeX article be improved instead? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 15:49, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

@HyadesHoliday: Among the external links of another article, I see The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List. I don't know how "official" it is but would it help to add that to the end of this article? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 20:37, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

@D.Lazard: The issue isn't that I don't have a reference to LaTeX code, as I know I can find the code elsewhere and I can use the old page. The issue is that where once this page was a useful collection of information on the name, meaning, and typographical information of many mathematical symbols, the typical user will now only see a the name and meaning of fewer symbols with worse formatting, and I was trying to give a user (rather than an editor) perspective on this. For example, it's ridiculous to expect the average user to access Help:FORMULA#Formatting using LaTeX for LaTeX symbols. I will survive, since I have the old page bookmarked, and I think I've said my piece on the utility of this one. HyadesHoliday (talk) 11:18, 5 April 2024 (UTC)

It helps me, as I also relied on the list for my academic writing, and came to this talk page looking to find out what happened. The glossary seems to be less comprehensive than the old list (e.g., there is no section on category theory), in addition to lacking the LaTeX codes, and doesn't observe the clean subject hierarchy of the other page. If I had suggestions to add on top of putting in the LaTeX codes, they would be expanding the article to at least the comprehensiveness of the list, and to introduce a similar hierarchy that breaks up symbols by field and topic within the field, for ease of navigation. As has been mentioned earlier, it was useful that there was a page that collected the name, meaning, and typographical information of just mathematical symbols, in one place.

I am also not fond of the glossary's formatting and didn't have much trouble with the tables on mobile, but consent that a large page of just tables doesn't conform to Wikipedia's readability norms. I'm not sure what would help with readability, something to more clearly break up the subsections for individual symbols, maybe. I do like that this page contains more description than the list. 173.206.19.146 (talk) 16:21, 30 June 2024 (UTC)

In a time where more and more people are switching to digital writing tools, I'd argue that the people who need to understand mathematical notation and the people who need to be able to type it are mostly the same. It doesn't make sense to differentiate between "general users" and editors/typographers here. 2.243.191.37 (talk) 14:34, 12 May 2024 (UTC)

Support: I think the ways of typing out a symbol are quite basic information on that symbol, and are also very useful for the people looking up lists of symbols. In the same way it's sensible to include a reference table in the ASCII article, I believe it sensible to include the typographic information on an article about symbols. DIYLobotmy (talk) 09:04, 23 May 2024 (UTC)

LaTeX commands

One of the merged articles used to contain the Latex commands that produce each symbol. I found this very useful. Can I still find the table anywhere else? Or some table like that one...

The LaTeX commands are in the source, but it's not the same. Madhing (talk) 21:25, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Nevermind, this has been discussed before. Madhing (talk) 21:35, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

For the convenience of future readers with the same question, see The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 22:35, 21 April 2024 (UTC)

Bullet operator

The article Bullet (typography) says A variant, the bullet operator (U+2219 ∙ BULLET OPERATOR) is used as a math symbol, akin to the dot operator. Specifically, in logic, x • y means logical conjunction. It is the same as saying "x and y" (see also List of logic symbols). Is it significant enough to be included here? --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:16, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

IMO, for being included, a symbol must be commonly used. This means that there must be textbooks that use it (the mention taht there is an author that used once the symbol is not sufficient). Clearly, Bullet (typography) is not a reliable source, not only per WP:USERGENERATED, but also because this is not a mathematical article. The anonymous table given as a reference is not a reliable source either. IMO, the use of a bullet instead of $\land$ is much too marginal for deserving a mention. D.Lazard (talk) 14:06, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

TYVM, until I saw that sentence, I had only ever heard of $\land$ as a logical AND, but assumed that the fault was mine. I guess somewhere in the Unicode Consortium correspondence there is an explanation. I don't propose to pursue it further. --𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 23:37, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

References

𝕁𝕄𝔽 (talk) 13:16, 20 July 2024 (UTC)

Angle brackets

I have seen angle brackets used with the following definition

$\langle \cdot \rangle =\mathrm {max} (\cdot ,0)$ ,

as in

$\langle \mathrm {f} (x)\rangle =\mathrm {max} (\mathrm {f} (x),0)$ .

But not sure how common that usage is. —DIV
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