Science Memes

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submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

An English dictionary is not really going to tell you what mathematicians are doing. Like, its goal is to describe what the word "integer" means (in various contexts), it won't tell you what the "integer series" is.

https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/138633/what-are-the-whole-numbers

The gist I see is that it's kind of ambiguous whether the whole number series includes negatives or not, and in higher math you won't see the term without a strict definition. It's much more likely you'd see "non-negative integers" or the like.

[+] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) (1 children)

Whoa, whoa, I'm not making this out to be like an imperialism thing. I'm not interested in what people ought to do.

The link I gave, a comment in there gives examples of papers where the term is being used to mean different things. So, this ambiguity is either something you just have to contend with (people using the term wrong), or you just don't read from those people. It's fine. Nobody is coming for you, I promise.

If I were in your class and you said "the whole numbers" but meant the negatives too, that'd probably give me pause (dumb American), but I have such herculean powers of intuition that I probably wouldn't even ask you a question about it.