131–140 of 267 posts
I think the safest fix is to avoid spreadsheets altogether, as long as scientific research is concerned.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right that violating established mathematical convention can be a deal-killer for some kinds of adoption. A few years ago I was reading the docs for a new programming language, thinking it might be useful in teaching. The docs were well-written and in a beautifully produced book. I got to the chapter on trig functions and discovered that they'd decided to make angles increase clockwise . And there was a graph…
The Godot game engine has its 2d graphics origin at the top-left of the screen, with the positive Y axis pointed down. Having clockwise trig functions is a natural consequence of that. I think it's a fairly common setup for all 2D graphics software.
I actually didn't even think about it until now. Now it's going to bug me. God damnit. :V
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right that violating established mathematical convention can be a deal-killer for some kinds of adoption. A few years ago I was reading the docs for a new programming language, thinking it might be useful in teaching. The docs were well-written and in a beautifully produced book. I got to the chapter on trig functions and discovered that they'd decided to make angles increase clockwise . And there was a graph…
The Godot game engine has its 2d graphics origin at the top-left of the screen, with the positive Y axis pointed down. Having clockwise trig functions is a natural consequence of that. I think it's a fairly common setup for all 2D graphics software.
I think it’s interesting that actually, they didnt change the rotation definition (from X+ toward Y+), but because it’s a visible change from their inversion of the plane, people believe they did.
Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.
An annoyance with spreadsheets that deterred me from ever using them in teaching is that they've perpetuated a arithmetic order-of-precedence bug. ("Bug" in the sense that it contradicts long-standing mathematical convention.) If you type -3^2 in a cell and press ENTER, the spreadsheet tell you it's "9". It should be "-9"; in math, exponentiation has precedence over unary minus, so you square 3, then negate the resul…
I'm aware that there are two different conventions on this issue, so I just use parentheses to get the behavior I want.
But, growing up, as the top math student in my class, it never occurred to me that somebody out there wants -3^2 to equal -9, I thought it was just a weird quirk in some calculators/programs. How would you read that expression aloud? I think of it as "negative three squared" so that's why (-3)^2 makes sense to me. Do you say "the negative of three squared"?
In 8th grade, I remember being instructed to type such an expression into the calculator to observe how it does something contrary to what we expect it to. From that moment on, I thought, "Huh, guess you have to use parentheses." It certainly wasn't cause enough to throw out my calculator, let alone tell others not to use it, just because I prefer a slightly different precedence convention.
We have a saying in German: A bad worker always blames their tools. Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.
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Interesting. In our high school math class when -3^2 was hand written it was ok to interpret it as (-3)^2. But maybe that could have been because spacing would be used as some informal parentheses.
Precedence rules are mostly a formalization of the underlying basic convention that the operations whose terms are written closer together are done first.
But if we’re doing math mostly on computers, we should adopt rules that make writing on computers easy — not pedantically insist typing code follow the rules of handwriting polynomials.
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Thanks. I had no idea. Seems counterintuitive at first, but it makes sense, since ’-3’ is '0 - 3'.
This is a good way to think of it. It would be very confusing if “0 - 3^2” and “0 + (-3^2)” should mean different things.
You said that “-3” = “0-3”.
So we have “-3^2” is “(0-3)^2” is 9. Agreeing with -3^2 = 9.
You’re performing a sleight of hand when you define “-3” to be “0-3”, but move the parenthesis to get your second equation. You have to insert your definition as a single term inside parenthesis — you can’t simply remove them to change association (as you have done). That’s against the rules.
So if you think “-3” is “0-3”, then you should agree the answer is 9.
Yes the tooling they use might be terrible. It is your responsibility to either deal with the terrible tooling yourself, learn better tooling, or get a capable computer person in the room, who can navigate the tooling landscape and get you the results.
And of course, that is not even addressing checking your result yet. This is a sad state of the research landscape, often financed by public money, and then throwing money at MS for using a proprietary tool and messing up.
We have a saying in German: A bad worker always blames their tools. Excel has many quirks, but I'm still very grateful that it exists, for quickly putting together some numbers and still being able to change the inputs to my formulas.