"Put a loop on the q, to avoid confusion with 9" yet the given example looks like a (badly drawn) 8 to me
or write 9 like in most parts of Europe, as a lower-case g, and write the letter g with a loop.
Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
21–30 of 79 posts
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#22"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.
I'm wondering if it would be confusing with just a dot inside the circle.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#23[deleted]
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#24"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.
I'm wondering if it would be confusing with just a dot inside the circle.
A dot inside could be mistaken for theta, especially with a bleedy pen.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#25Loop your l's, and cross your sevens and your z's to avoid confusing them with ones and twos. Exaggerate the differences between your i's and your j's by looping your j's. Curve the base of your t's to avoid confusing them with f's. Math is a lot harder to do when you cannot distinguish your variables from each other and numbers.
And also make sure to distinguish between your pi's and your n's! I can't count the number of times I've mixed the two up while finding Fourier coefficients.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#26I 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
at some point in math you'll never use x for times/multiplication -- you'll always use a dot, unless you're specifically doing a cross product. And that is a good stage to reach. (I still have trouble using x for multiplication though.)
And the cross product is used with vectors, which are either symbols like u or v, or written with an underscore / arrow on top, so there's zero risk of confusion.
(Also, the cross product is always a less elegant alternative to the exterior product, but I guess this isn't the place for that rant.)
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#27I'm of mixed feelings about all the Greek letters used in physics, math, etc. Eventually (after years of hard learning how to understand the underlying equations physically) I got over the hurdle of them always instantly making any equation more complicated and hard to understand -- and instead seeing them as just constants that could be basically ignored for most of the procedure (in many settings).
I do still feel though, that they are a legacy of when all these fancy old Greek-reading scientists could flex their knowledge of unfamiliar symbols and choose to make it hard for people who couldn't grasp it immediately. ("Now to simplify the equation let's introduce the zeta function into this expression!")
Lowercase Xi and Zeta were the worst. Never mind that they were the rarest and always most complex (visually) of letters to be used -- but also always horribly written by students/teachers, and made it even more incomprehensible.
I have similar feelings about the bra/ket notations in QM.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#28I 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
at some point in math you'll never use x for times/multiplication -- you'll always use a dot, unless you're specifically doing a cross product. And that is a good stage to reach. (I still have trouble using x for multiplication though.)
> you'll always use a dot
No, often you will use nothing - simple juxtaposition.
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#29The 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,…
[deleted]
Re: Tips for Mathematical Handwriting (2007)
#30When I went back to school I had to take math again, which wasn't my best subject in school. I was determined to figure out why I could understand the material, yet consistently never quite did as well as I thought I should have on tests. So I kept a journal of every mistake I made so I could categorize them and understand them. Most of the mistakes were very specific handwriting mistakes, but they were very particular to how I personally tended to write things. By changing how I wrote a few numbers and letters, I eliminated all of those mistakes. I didn't have to come up with an overly elaborate system that puts way too much thought (and not enough evidence) like in the OP. It was quite surprised that I tended to mistake 7s, qs and 9s (if the loop is too small and there's another character written above it, you can misread some of my more atrocious attempts at writing 9), or that I would fail to properly coil the 6 and make it look like an overly spiraled 0. Meanwhile, I never once mistook a 1 for a 7 and my solution to the letter O is just to never, ever use them in math.
My advice is actually that mistake journal: it was the single best thing I ever did for a math class. Figure out what mistakes are actually happening and develop a system or habit to avoid that actual mistake.