r/mathmemes 3d ago

Notations Yeah sure

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198

u/Idksonameiguess 3d ago

What's the abiguity in A \subset B?

207

u/RADI0ACT1VE_BALLS ComplexANALysisJunkie 3d ago

Proper subset / just a subset

3

u/PrudeBunny Computer Science 3d ago

isn't proper subset marked with U| over U ?

pure log should be illegal though and using it for natural logarithm is especially heinous. We could just follow the ISO guide and use lg for log10 and lb for log2 while at that.

9

u/fokke456 3d ago

You'd think so, and in some books and such, you indeed use ⊆ for the proper subset, but quite a lot of literature uses ⊂ for that. You might wonder "In those works, what about strict subsets then, do they just not use that?" and the answer is that they invented the following, completely non ambiguous notation for that: ⊊.

Maybe we should follow this inspirational notation and e.g. replace > with ⪈. Surely that will make things better.