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  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzZero to hero
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    6 months ago

    Rigorously, yes. Unambiguously, no. Plenty of words (like continuity) can mean different things in different contexts. The important thing isn’t the word, it’s that the word has a clear definition within the context of a proof. Obviously you want to be able to communicate ideas clearly and so a convention of symbols and terms have been established over time, but conventions can change over time too.


  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzZero to hero
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    6 months ago

    Natural numbers are used commonly in mathematics across the world. Sequences are fundamental to the field of analysis, and a sequence is a function whose domain is the natural numbers.

    You also need to index sets and those indices are usually natural numbers. Whether you index starting at 0 or 1 is pretty inconsistent, and you end up needing to specify whether or not you include 0 when you talk about the natural numbers.

    Edit: I misread and didn’t see you were talking about whole numbers. I’m going to leave the comment anyway because it’s still kind of relevant.


  • RandomWalker@lemmy.worldtoScience Memes@mander.xyzZero to hero
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    6 months ago

    I could be completely wrong, but I doubt any of my (US) professors would reference an ISO definition, and may not even know it exists. Mathematicians in my experience are far less concerned about the terminology or symbols used to describe something as long as they’re clearly defined. In fact, they’ll probably make up their own symbology just because it’s slightly more convenient for their proof.