Andy Pitonyak (Sonntag, 22. November 2009, 21:50): > When I see something like "A x B", I do not assume that A is > multiplied by B; I assume that a cross product will occur. I will > concede that 2A is more readily understood as 2 times A than AB is > A times B, but, for anyone that understands the math, that one > particular notation may prove unsettling. Hmm, and I thought we should even replace "E = min((M + I),255)" with "E = M + I" (plus a footnote or so) because the first formula might be too complicate for some users... ;-) > I will concede that in different places and at different levels, > both the cross product (like an x) and dot product (a single dot) > symbols are used to represent multiplication. I usually only see > this in very introductory level material. Using the "x" (ISO-8859-1 / Unicode 0xD7) as "simple" multiplication sign seems to be a standard for texts created (or used) by computer programs. (Most programmers would probably use the familiar "*", and you would never find it e.g. in a German math book, though.) Same with the division sign (÷) -- a kind of standard(?), but it seems that nobody uses it. (If I remember correctly we used this division sign at school when we learned how to divide integers...) > If you do choose to use a symbol to represent multiplication I > strongly recommend extra text explaining this with perhaps a foot > note when this format is used. We should get rid of any problems if we use the \cdot macro, which produces the usual multiplication symbol. > I recommend against this usage. I do not expect to ever see it in > cases such as 1-2(1-1/2), or (A-B)(C+D). These are good examples where we could easily omit any multiplication symbol. But a formula like "256I" (with 'I' in italics) looks ugly, and e.g. "E = MI" may look a bit weird outside the math lessons. So my suggestions is that we use \cdot if the formula looks better with a multiplication symbol, and don't use any multiplication symbol otherwise. Ulf
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