Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
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Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
1–10 of 79 posts
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#2Don't loop the 2 or you'll have the problem with alpha, as they show a few lines later.
Crossing the Z resolves the need to loop the 2.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#3I wish we'd been taught this in high school.
One habit I did learn in high school is writing x as two 'c' shapes in a mirror image. This is clearly an x rather than a multiplication symbol. I prefer it to the version listed in the article.
I find it hard to distinguish the author's X/χ
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#4"Put a loop on the q, to avoid confusion with 9"
yet the given example looks like a (badly drawn) 8 to me
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#5The response from a(nother) mathematician: don't worry too much about this specific advice; it's one guy's convention, not dogma. But do have very definite conventions of your own to which you adhere carefully and faithfully, whether they're this author's or anyone else's, or your own custom blend. As the author mentions, too many undergraduates don't pay attention to distinctions among similar-but-different symbols, but I've seen even professional mathematicians who don't distinguish properly among, for example, w, ϖ, and ω. (I even refereed a paper once whose author didn't distinguish between o and 0 as subscripts!) Don't be one of them!
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#6"Put a loop on the capital O so it doesn’t look like a zero"
I do no put loops on O's, but to this day I have a habit of writing a stroke (in forward slash direction) inside zero.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#7It’s not entirely true that context can’t help disambiguate mathematical notation. The situations in which it’s common to use a lowercase omega are quite distinct from those where it’s common to use a lowercase w. Even if both appear in the same formula, they will tend to have very different roles. Good notational choices also try to avoid these ambiguities. You probably shouldn’t use v and nu at the same time, even in typeset math.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#8I wish we'd been taught this in high school. One habit I did learn in high school is writing x as two 'c' shapes in a mirror image. This is clearly an x rather than a multiplication symbol. I prefer it to the version listed in the article. I find it hard to distinguish the author's X/χ
Random side-comment - high school is probably the time to do it too. I'm in the middle of teaching my kids how to read/write (the older one) and recognize letters (younger one). I reflexively crossed the "z" when writing out the alphabet the other day and thought to myself, "should I be teaching this?" I decided to erase it and write how they normally see it.
I started crossing z's and doing a few of the other tips (some taught, some natural) in this page when it became necessary. But the pedantic in me really wanted to instill it in my kids from the get-go. I suppose experience (going through the problems of mixing up symbols) is the best teacher for the mathematical handwriting solution.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#9The most maddening for me was using letter pairs such as u and v, or zeta and xi, that are just handwriting death traps. No matter how good you are, you're going to screw up once, and kiss your derivation goodbye.
Plus, as good an idea as it sounds, telling my hands to make the same letter the same way twice is hopeless.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#10I wish we'd been taught this in high school. One habit I did learn in high school is writing x as two 'c' shapes in a mirror image. This is clearly an x rather than a multiplication symbol. I prefer it to the version listed in the article. I find it hard to distinguish the author's X/χ
X written as )( is the absolute worst. It always looks like two parenthesis when I'm grading student writing and I have no idea how to parse what they write.