Bruce Bostwick wrote:
> On Jan 9, 2009, at 8:15 AM, David Hobby wrote:
...
>> The crude answer to you would be to say:
>> "Oh, so it means that? Then go edit Wikipedia
>> to say so." See:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_transformation
>>
>> That's a great function of Wikipedia--standardizing
>> nomenclature.
>>
>> ---David
>
> To the extent to which nomenclature can be standardized, that is.
> (Some terms have overlapping and somewhat incompatible definitions
> across the namespaces of different specialties, and sometimes all that
> can be done to remove the ambiguity is specify the namespace. :)
Bruce--
Oh, of course. Wikipedia is full of disambiguation
pages. So I guess a better statement would be that
a meaning should be at least listed on Wikipedia as
an alternative.
For instance, I have a co-author who wanted to use
a non-standard definition of the Catalan numbers in
our paper. (They're a sequence of integers, and it's
that classic problem: do you start with the 1st one or
with the 0th one?) Pointing out that Wikipedia gave
a different definition was a quick way to settle the
issue. Quicker than using some particular paper
encyclopedia would have been, since to be fair I'd
have to look up the Catalan numbers in a bunch of
them.
> And some of us became accustomed at an early age to integer number
> systems that wrap around from (2^n)-1 to -2^n, for various relatively
> small values of n. :)
For some values of "early"? I don't think kindergarteners
count "1, 2, 3, -4, -3, ...". : )
---David
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