Talk:Table of mathematical symbols
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This page is intended to make mathematical articles more readable for mathematical beginners. What do you Wikimaticians think about it? --Rade
This talk is all about visual appearances. I'm a non-mathematician attempting to create alt text for images of math formulae and need examples of how to verbalize or linearize them in natural language. The explanation column for each symbol in the table should include a natural language verbalization of the example in question, not just an explanation of it. How would one mathematician read the formula over the phone to another mathematician, perhaps a stranger, using best practice terminology, is what I'm after. For example, I'm having difficulty in trying to apply the "sum over ... from ... to ... of" given with the sigma/summation definition in the table to a very fancy-looking pair of formulae that place the symbol in different places, one covering an entire fraction, the other covering only the numerator part of a fraction.
Eamon
John Knouse apparently has trouble seeing these symbols properly on Netscape 4.7, and I can't see them on IE 6.0. We really need to get some kind of help page for how to display math symbols, because neither of these browsers is all that old, and seeing math symbols shouldn't be a pain in the ass for wikipedians.
In my case right now, I think the trouble is that I don't have the right fonts installed. I tried to go to http://www.microsoft.com/typography//fontpack/default.htm to download the Microsoft "web fonts", which have resolved many of my past web font troubles, but they have discontinued the free downloads there.
Does anyone know where one can download the right fonts? I think it has to be a unicode font with symbols in the right range, but I don't off hand know what that range is, and my current connection is too slow to just try downloading things at random.
--Ryguasu
It might be useful to add a column telling the reader how to produce these symbols. Eclecticology 08:32 Sep 4, 2002 (PDT)
Maybe, it is better to create a page in the Wikipedia name space for this purpose (if there isn't already one) and put a link in the article. --Rade
Yup: wikipedia:How does one edit a page contains a list of math symbols and their HTML entities. AxelBoldt
Axel, what do you mean that the leftwards arrows aren't used? I see them all the time! Heck, I use them myself. — Toby 07:45 Sep 18, 2002 (UTC)
You mean for functions? f: X <- Y ? I have never seen that in my life. It certainly doesn't occur in Wikipedia anywhere. Or do you mean in logic? I would venture a guess that there are no left implication arrows in Wikipedia anywhere either. AxelBoldt
I have seen both of these, the function symbol often in literature related to category theory (and not just in commutative diagrams, but inline with the colon). An example where this is useful (in a variety of contexts) is
- f: Y ← U ⊆ X
to indicate a partial function f from X to Y with domain U. This is clearer than either
- f: U ⊆ X → Y or
- f: X ⊇ U → Y,
at least in my opinion (and apparently in others'). That said, the question becomes whether we should document such usage if it's not used in Wikipedia. I think that we should, since it's easy to grasp and might end up being used in the future. However, I'm not 100% convinced of this.
— Toby 05:05 Sep 19, 2002 (UTC)
Well, since this page is directed at beginners, I think we should include only relevant symbols. People who read these category texts can probably figure out what the left arrows mean, for anybody else it's just information overload. AxelBoldt
All right, but you agree that the moment that it shows up in a basic Wikipedia article, then it shows up here. (And shows up fairly, of course; I won't stick an example in just to spite you ^_^.) — Toby 23:10 Sep 19, 2002 (UTC)
The question of undisplayable characters in many popular browsers is, IMO, best addressed by creating graphics. A drawback is that it is too hard to make them in a variety of point sizes, so they must be made to fit the average context. I made such a character, "Missing image
Del.gif
Image:Del.gif
", and use it in several articles. David 22:12 Dec 27, 2002 (UTC)
- IMO this question is not best addressed by creating graphics. Apart from the drawback you mentioned, the use of graphics is more complicated than the use of character entities. This reduces the ease of use which is a basic idea of Wikipedia. Another drawback is that in the mid-future all browser will display these characters and the re-substitution will be a lot of work. A better idea would be to suggest a software feature that translates the entities into graphics if the user sets their preferences so. In this way, proper character sizes could be chosen. --Rade
- We now have TeX markup on Wikipedia: <math>\nabla<math>. problem solved -- it generates PNG images or HTML, depending on user prefs and complexity. In the future, as more browsers a re smarter, it will generate more HTML or MathML. -- Tarquin 19:37 Jan 6, 2003 (UTC)
Unfortunately, this solution does not work well. Look at the above paragraph with a browser and OS that do not support the "nabla" entity for "Missing image
Del.gif
Image:Del.gif
", and you will see problems: the background is white instead of transparent, and it is about 50% too large (at least, on my computer). It was a very good idea, though. David 21:36 Jan 7, 2003 (UTC)
| Contents |
Rejigging table
I would like to rejig the table, in part to get rid of those ridiculous H1 tags which someone has employed to make the left-hand column larger, and in part to make the layout more logical, giving more space to the larger items. How does the following look:
Symbol
| Name | Explanation | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Should be read as | |||
| Category | |||
+
| addition | 4 + 6 = 10 means: that if 4 is added to 6, the sum, or result, is 10. | 43 + 65 = 108; 2 + 7 = 9 |
| plus | |||
| arithmetic | |||
−
| subtraction | 9 − 4 = 5 means: that if 4 is subtracted from 9, the result will be 5. | 87 − 36 = 51 |
| minus | |||
| arithmetic | |||
| negative sign | −3 means: the negative of the number 3. | −(− 5) = 5 | |
| negative | |||
| arithmetic | |||
| set theoretic complement | A − B means: the set that contains all those elements of A that are not in B | {1,2,3,4} − {3,4,5,6} = {1,2} | |
| minus; without | |||
| set theory |
- Your version looks better to me. I always hated those extraneous lines in the "symbol" column. Some thoughts, you might want to consider adding some cellpadding, say cellpadding=3? Also It might be good to left align "name", center align "read as" and right align "category" to better distinguish these. Like so:
Symbol
| Name | Explanation | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Should be read as | |||
| Category | |||
+
| addition | 4 + 6 = 10 means: that if 4 is added to 6, the sum, or result, is 10. | 43 + 65 = 108; 2 + 7 = 9 |
| plus | |||
| arithmetic | |||
−
| subtraction | 9 − 4 = 5 means: that if 4 is subtracted from 9, the result will be 5. | 87 − 36 = 51 |
| minus | |||
| arithmetic | |||
| negative sign | −3 means: the negative of the number 3. | −(− 5) = 5 | |
| negative | |||
| arithmetic | |||
| set theoretic complement | A − B means: the set that contains all those elements of A that are not in B | {1,2,3,4} − {3,4,5,6} = {1,2} | |
| minus; without | |||
| set theory |
Paul August 16:42, Oct 8, 2004 (UTC)
several omissions
This table does not do anything for dot or cross products of vectors, it lacks the superset symbol and doesn't do the funtion operators like composition. Where is the vector "harpoon" arrow or the colon used in ratios and odds? "Therefore" and "since" symbols are missing. The symbols for Irrational numbers, Imaginary numbers and Counting numbers (Ie natural numbers without 0) are not there. The article in general needs some serious cleanup too. I will do all this given time however, my times is quite limited. --[[User:Sunborn|]] 21:26, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
- It is also missing the delta as used in "change-in", the coproduct operator, the plus/minus operator and doesn't mention the circled plus as an operator for direct sum. This page needs some cleanup and expansion. User:Sunborn/s
- Also missing is the composition operator. User:Sunborn/s
If we want a complete list, and we do, every unicode supported math symbol is available (http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2200.pdf). It is a PDF so watch out.--[[User:Sunborn|]] 19:22, 9 Dec 2004 (UTC)
Printing
It would be incredibly useful for people to be able to print out this page. When I try to print this page I get muddled tables - pages break in the middle of cells, the top left edge of cells which occur at the top of a page is left out, some symbols don't show up.Is it possible (using CSS or some other method)to tell the printer that certain things (like table cells) are inviolable? Then you could set something up such that the whole table gets broken up into smaller tables (depending on where the end of a given page is, which I presume is variable across different platforms/setups) and the rule would be: divide table cells so that only the line between two large cells (i.e. the cells which contain the symbols, and which correspond to individual entries) may be interpreted as a breakable point in the table. With CSS I would think you could get the table to construct itself dynamically that way, assuming that CSS knows anything about or can account for the behavior of printers. As for some symbols not showing up in printing, I can't fathom why, it shows up fine in my browser, and the omitted symbols are not limited to symbols which occur at page breaks. Also, it only seems to affect the large symbols at the beginnings of each entry, so if anyone thinks they have an idea what this kind of problem sounds like, please fix. Note for testing purposes, I'm using Mozilla firefox. Things may (possibly) behave differently with different browsers.
Inclusions
Does pi really belong here? It is the only constant in the table. If pi is here, why not 0?
- Well for one, zero is number. But you have the right idea. There is at least one mathematically derived constant, e. So it would be interesting to know if pi would fit the bill of a mathematical symbol?--User:Sunborn/si 03:52, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)
Template:MathSymbols - starting a quick reference template. -==SV 20:07, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)