Is the Notation for Inverse Functions Ambiguous?

[TylerH]

Theoretically...

 

[Dickfore]

Wait...cows aren't really spherical?

Just in case you haven't been aware:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow"

 

[dimension10]

Well I certainly consider pi to be an unfortunate historic mistake. Math would be slightly more beautiful with tau. But this is the way it is and we need to stick with it.

Other unfortunate mistakes are the definition of the gamma function and the notation $$\subset$$ to mean subset or equal. But there's nothing we can do about those now...

Yes. Notations like sin^-1 are a bit ambiguous quite often.

 

[TylerH]

Yes. Notations like sin^-1 are a bit ambiguous quite often.

IMHO, it's the notation $sin^n(x)=\left( sin(x) \right)^n$ that is ambiguous, rather than inverse notation. In general, $f^{-1}$ is ubiquitously the inverse of f.