An Infinitely Large Napkin

Re:An Infinitely Large Napkin by kangnkodos on Thursday June 13, 2019 @02:10PM (#20177288)

Many, many years. Also, it's a thing in college. I don't think they talked about this much in high school when I was there. If they did, they started each book with a review, "Z is the set of integers".

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Re:An Infinitely Large Napkin by kangnkodos on Thursday June 13, 2019 @02:12PM (#20177299)

I agree with you that for anyone who recently took math in college, it's obvious that Z is the set of integers. But for someone just learning it? Not so much.

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Re:An Infinitely Large Napkin by galaxyLogic on Friday June 14, 2019 @01:22AM (#20180753)

I would say that even though it may be commonly used it is a bad name for Integers because it is not mnemonic. "I" would be a much better name for the set of Integers I would think.

But whatever you call it should not be too much effort to state in the beginning of a presentation or chapter or book, these are the symbols we will be using:

I = Set of Integers, ....

Sure it might be redundant but it is also easy for the reader to step over such explanations if they are familiar with them, but come back if they find some symbol they are not quite sure of. Question is are we trying to make the book easy for readers to understand, or short for the writer to write.

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Re:An Infinitely Large Napkin by ginnungagap on Friday June 14, 2019 @04:02AM (#20181242)

It is a mnemonic if you're German, which is where the symbol comes from, it's the Z of Zählen!

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Re:An Infinitely Large Napkin by galaxyLogic on Saturday June 15, 2019 @10:54PM (#20193567)

Good point. Of course. But if I'm writing or reading in English I still would prefer "I".

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