4Fun:Worst/Best Notations in Mathematics

[Swapnil]

As CRGreathouse mentioned, the use of the word "function" is not appropriate for a relation which is multi-valued.

Why is that?

 

[arildno]

Why is that?

Because a "function" is defined to be SINGLE-valued.
It is a fact of life.

Also note that what we might call a "multi-valued" function, can always be considered as a single-valued function from the given domain and having as its co-domain the POWER SET of of the set containing the various function values.

 

[CRGreathouse]

Division on the integers is an example, since division by 0 is undefined.

And by "integers", I mean "reals".

 

[Gelsamel Epsilon]

A person in my calculus class got upset and stormed out of class because she kept confusing imaginary numbers with vector measurements (use of i in both).

 

[Office_Shredder]

The number 3 is pretty confusing to be honest

 

[Swapnil]

I hate the prime notation for derivatives because, in physics, people often use variables like x and x' and this can be confusing sometimes. Although, I have to say that when used unambigiously, the prime notation for derivatives is pretty useful and often takes away the scary $$\frac{d}{dx}$$ operator.

 

[Swapnil]

One more thing that I realized is that the function notation $$e^{(.)}$$ is very limited. I mean that when the argument in the exponent gets complicated (which happens often I think), it becomes really hard to distingush what's an exponent and what's not. I would say that $$\exp(.)$$ is a far better notation in the long run.