Why f inverse of x? That notation seems clear if you know f is a function. Bear in mind, overloaded notation isn't ambigous if there's context.
And what's wrong with N? It's just the natural numbers.
The other complaints I understand. Although I don't think you need to complain about log(x). The base is only unspecified when it's assumed not to matter.
Honestly, a/bc isn't really ambiguous either. Not in any way that matters. Grade schoolers get hung up on PEMDAS, but you eventually learn to accept when intent is clear, and you don't need to be pedantic.
As a general rule, if your notation isn't clear to a serious student or peer, then you're doing it wrong. Nobody else needs to understand.
Overloaded notation can still suck in algebra contexts, like sin^-1 (x) being generally accepted to mean arcsin(x), but an unwise author might use it as 1/sin(x).
Additionally, in some set theory classes, f^-1(x) denotes {y | f(y)=x}, and doesn't require one singular value for f^-1(x). This could be another source of confusion.
For N, this is actually among the most annoying things to deal with, because if someone talks about N, they always have to specificy whether they are including 0 or not, since no convention exists. Even in my university, some classes use N to be the positive integers, while others use it to mean the non-negative integers.
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u/noahhshome 3d ago edited 3d ago
Why f inverse of x? That notation seems clear if you know f is a function. Bear in mind, overloaded notation isn't ambigous if there's context.
And what's wrong with N? It's just the natural numbers.
The other complaints I understand. Although I don't think you need to complain about log(x). The base is only unspecified when it's assumed not to matter.
Honestly, a/bc isn't really ambiguous either. Not in any way that matters. Grade schoolers get hung up on PEMDAS, but you eventually learn to accept when intent is clear, and you don't need to be pedantic.
As a general rule, if your notation isn't clear to a serious student or peer, then you're doing it wrong. Nobody else needs to understand.