Once in a undergraduate linear algebra class the prof corrected a student by saying, "you mean 'the' instead of 'a'". He didn't make a big deal of it but a light bulb turned on in my head.
My most recent encounter of this was when someone used "the" precisely and clearly. I asked him whether he was a mathematician. Indeed he was. On Sun, Oct 6, 2013 at 10:48 AM, km <[email protected]> wrote: > I had a teacher who would not say "x and y are equal" because the plural > "are" implies they are NOT equal. He would say "If x is a number and y is > a number ..." rather then "If x and y are numbers ... " when he wanted to > allow the possibility that x is y. Some of us saw that by enforcing this > kind of precision he was creating an esprit de corps for his graduate > students in mathematics. > > --Kip Murray ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
