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it’s rough when the math gets so complicated that you have to break your finger in order to be able to visualize things

you could put “AI is making things worse.” after just about any sentence and it would probably be true.

i wish they would do this in math instead of the boring system where it’s always alphabetical

that’s an extremely rare sighting but it’s so satisfying to read

what are your thoughts on “whence”?

that would be a lot clearer. i’ve just been burned in the past by notation in analysis.

my two most painful memories are:

• in the (baby) rudin textbook, he uses f(x+) to denote the limit of _f _from the right, and f(x-) to denote the limit of f from the left.
• in friedman analysis textbook, he writes the direct sum of vector spaces as M + N instead of using the standard notation M ⊕ N. to make matters worse, he uses M ⊕ N to mean M is orthogonal to N.

there’s the usual “null spaces” instead of “kernel” nonsense. ive also seen lots of analysis books use the → symbol to define functions when they really should have been using the ↦ symbol.

at this point, i wouldn’t put anything past them.

unless f(x~0~ ± δ) is some kind of funky shorthand for the set { f(x) : x ∈ ℝ, | x - x~0~ | < δ }. in that case, the definition would be “correct”.

it’s much more likely that it’s a typo, but analysts have been known to cook up some pretty bizarre notation from time to time, so it’s not totally out of the question.

i think the ε-δ approach leads to way more cumbersome and long proofs, and it leads to a good amount of separation between the “idea being proved” and the proof itself.

it’s especially rough when you’re chasing around multiple “limit variables” that depend on different things. i still have flashbacks to my second measure theory course where we would spend an entire two hour lecture on one theorem, chasing around ε and η throughout different parts of the proof.

best to nip it in the bud id say

i still feel like this whole ε-δ thing could have been avoided if we had just put more effort into the “infinitesimals” approach, which is a bit more intuitive anyways.

but on the other hand, you need a lot of heavy tools to make infinitesimals work in a rigorous setting, and shortcuts can be nice sometimes

the rest of the chocolate chips are sleeper raisins. one click of a button and it’s an oatmeal raisin world.

behold, a man

🤐