Notations Around the World: Census and Exploitation
Abstract:
Mathematical notations around the world are diverse. Not as much as
requiring computing machines' makers to adapt to each culture, but
as much as to disorient a person landing on a web-page with a text
in mathematics.
In order to understand better this diversity, we are building a census
of notations: it should allow any content creator or mathematician
to grasp which mathematical notation is used in which language and
culture. The census is built collaboratively, collected in pages
with a given semantic and presenting observations of the widespread
notations being used in existing materials by a graphical extract.
We contend that our approach should dissipate the fallacies found
here and there about the notations in ``other cultures" so that a
better understanding of the cultures can be realized.
The exploitation of the census in the math-bridge project is also
presented: this project aims at taking learners ``where they are
in their math-knowledge" and bring them to a level ready to start
engineering studies. The census serves as definitive reference for
the transformation elements that generate the rendering of formulæ
in web-browsers.
Published:
Intelligent Computer Mathematics, Serge Autexier, Jacques Calmet, David Delahaye,
Patrick D.F. Ion, Laurence Rideau, Renaud Rioboo and Alan P. Sexton (eds),
Lecture Notes in Computer Science,
Volume 6167/2010, 398-410, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-14128-7_34, 2010