Re: What annoys you in mathematical text?
- From: "Proginoskes" <CCHeckman@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 30 Jun 2006 15:14:21 -0700
HopfZ wrote:
Toni Lassila wrote:
[...]
So what particular things annoy you when reading a mathematical paper
or a book? I would also appreciate hearing about people's annoyances
that are somewhat non-standard. I mean, everybody hates things like
the overuse of "it's easy to see" and "clearly". What is your pet
peeve of which you'd like to see authors rid themselves?
One of my doctoral advisors noted, after reading a preliminary version
of my thesis, that when I said a result was "easy to see", it was, and
when I said it was "straightforward but requires a lot of work", it
was. So I didn't have to do much rewriting.
1. errors.
I know. we're all human and make mistakes.
[...]
3. lack of figures
Imagine Euclid's Elements without figures.
Of course, you know Euclid's Elements suffers from mistakes, don't you?
For instance, you also need the axiom that two circles of radius A and
B, whose radii are a distance of less than A+B apart, will intersect
each other in exactly two places. Otherwise, you can't even bisect a
line segment. (I don't remember who I heard this from, but it's not an
original idea of mine.)
BTW, I co-authored a graph theory paper which had no figures in it.
--- Christopher Heckman
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