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Weird symbols
Oct. 26th, 2017 12:54 pmMy little brother finished the first draft of his bachelor thesis in technical mathematics, and because he's a) a perfectionist, b) smarter than me and did not wait until the very last minute, he sent it to friends for feedback. He even asked me to take a look and check the formatting. I learned several things:
- The "weird square" that showed up after formulas is not a formatting error of some kind, but apparently the symbol for "q.e.d."
- When he quotes sources, in-text he only uses an abbreviation for the author's name, and that references the bibliography at the end. I'm used to in-text references including both the author's full name AND the year. It makes sense because doesn't matter when a mathematical proof was discovered, while in economics and social sciences the date of a work already includes important information about the circumstances of its creation, but it still surprised me.
- Apparently it's not unusual for math papers not to have a conclusion/summary at the end. Odd.
- Math people use many strange symbols and weird words. To be fair I already knew that, but it was weird to go from the introduction, where there were sentences between the formulas, to the main part, where there were words between the formulas. (Exaggerated but not much.)
LB will have his first degree soon, and his second probably by summer :) My little brother is very smart.
- The "weird square" that showed up after formulas is not a formatting error of some kind, but apparently the symbol for "q.e.d."
- When he quotes sources, in-text he only uses an abbreviation for the author's name, and that references the bibliography at the end. I'm used to in-text references including both the author's full name AND the year. It makes sense because doesn't matter when a mathematical proof was discovered, while in economics and social sciences the date of a work already includes important information about the circumstances of its creation, but it still surprised me.
- Apparently it's not unusual for math papers not to have a conclusion/summary at the end. Odd.
- Math people use many strange symbols and weird words. To be fair I already knew that, but it was weird to go from the introduction, where there were sentences between the formulas, to the main part, where there were words between the formulas. (Exaggerated but not much.)
LB will have his first degree soon, and his second probably by summer :) My little brother is very smart.
