2010/04/28 by Paul Libbrecht, Libbrecht, Paul
Computer Science · #Digital Libraries (cs.DL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #H.3.5 #H.5.2 #Open Education and E-Learning #cs.DL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1004.5165
14 pages, To appear in The 9th International Conference on Mathematical Knowledge Management: MKM 2010
arxiv created 2010/04/28 · openalex publication_date 2010/04/28 · arxiv updated 2010/04/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.