Weird symbols

[schneefink]

My 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.

Comments

[ursula]

The weird square is called a "Halmos tombstone", after the mathematician Paul Halmos.

[schneefink]

So math papers are full of tombstones? Awesome xD

[jesse_the_k]

I needed to know this. Thank you.

[ichipinky]

congratulations to him! a math paper sounds intriguing! i've only ever read linguistics/education-related ones

[schneefink]

I have no idea how interesting it actually is, on account of not understanding any of it ^^ Some of it was cryptography-related, that sounded interesting, but mostly when he tells me about it I just nod a lot and make sympathetic noises.

[ichipinky]

the format's enough! like how summaries/conclusions aren't needed and how they cite sources and such. it's interesting to see what's...valued(?) in a way by different fields of study and wow that sounds nerdy af :D

[schneefink]

Agreed! It seems strange to me sometimes how much more absolute mathematics is than, hm, almost everything else, and it's not surprising that that leads to different conventions.

[jesse_the_k]

I lived and worked with a set-theoretic topologist. I showed up for "support" when she defended her thesis.

Ha! The first sentence made some kind of sense and then it all dribbled out my ears.

[schneefink]

Yep, that's very familiar.

[out_there]

Apparently it's not unusual for math papers not to have a conclusion/summary at the end. Odd.

That seems very weird to me. What's the point of a report without a summary?

[schneefink]

*shrugs* Maybe because it's "just" a bachelor thesis? From what little I understand, the important part is not the result but the how-to, which is hard to summarize.

[out_there]

I'm just so used to the idea of argumentative writing, of persuading people to a point of view. But that's probably the business background in me coming out -- accountancy only believes in reports if they're actually telling a story and convincing an audience. (Usually in a "look, hey, we're solvent and totally a good investment" way, but it's still a story.)

[schneefink]

Me too! But LB repeatedly reminds me that mathematics is very different from social sciences: mathematical proofs can be incorrect, but if they're correct you don't have to convince anyone of that, they just are.

[out_there]

Huh. That is a very different approach. Makes sense, but *different*.

[marginaliana]

Apparently it's not unusual for math papers not to have a conclusion/summary at the end. Odd.

How interesting! I'm obviously a humanities person because I'm just going, "but... how do you make it all related to each other?"

Congrats to him for finishing!

[schneefink]

Apparently math papers have much longer and detailed forewords that explain where this paper fits in relation to everything else etc. (Longer proofs/papers probably still have conclusions, I assume, but not shorter ones like a bachelor thesis.)