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I have recently spent some minutes cleaning up a slight mess left by someone who made some insignificant edits to a page, changing the name of a category to here and there, but inconsistently and also with further introduction of typos like . I have changed back those particular edits (while keeping improvements made elsewhere).
Just as we customarily choose to respect insignificant differences in spelling among us (e.g., British vs. American), I would like to ask people to respect different choices of notation, as long as those choices are made consistently and presumably aren’t completely daft (when they are, please bring to attention at the nForum). I sometimes use math calligraphy, but I generally eschew it because I don’t like mathematical notation that looks more ornate than it has to be. In this, I consider myself to be in good company with people like John Baez.
In any event, I make this choice for myself when I write, and while others might make different choices, I would not change their choices just to suit my personal preferences, and I would reject as antisocial anyone’s insistence to change to his or her notation in cases where the difference is unimportant (color of bike shed?). It gets worse when someone decides to make such changes (in the present instance, without announcement) and then makes a mess of it. Anyway, for such insignificant cases, the socially right course should be “agree to disagree”, exactly as in the case of spelling.
Sorry for the inconsistency and the typo, thanks for catching it. When I did those edits, I felt myself like spending a few minutes cleaning up somebody’s mess, concerning organization of the entry.
I sometimes feel it’s good to have different fonts for different kinds ot entities. If objects are denoted by upper case plain letters, then I find it awkward to also label the categories with the same kinds of symbols. But it’s not a big deal to me.
Sometimes if I'm adding to or rearranging a page significantly, such that I'm writing or rewriting much of the material, then I'm happy because it means that I can change some notation that I dislike. Otherwise I don't feel that I have the right to. (Same with spelling, of course. Not to mention Urs's and my disagreement about whether to use # Contents or # [nicely formatted title of page] before the contents list.)
I sometimes feel it’s good to have different fonts for different kinds of entities. If objects are denoted by upper case plain letters, then I find it awkward to also label the categories with the same kinds of symbols. But it’s not a big deal to me.
I can definitely understand that (and glad this notational issue is no big deal to you). Indeed, I think I’ve slowly been morphing to using something like for a category and for an object of , but calligraphy and gothic fonts I generally don’t care for myself except where I judge them very traditional.
We’ve had related discussions on organizational edits, and while some disagreement among us has been expressed here as well, I think I supported the organizational edits you made in this particular case, so thanks for those improvements.
Generally, I realize that I have been tending to edit a bit hastily, leaving annoying typos. I want to apologize for that generally. I will try take a bit more time for a single entry, or else postpone editing it until I do have the leisure.
Another comment: I have necessarily heard of the argument along the line that “fancy fonts for mathematical objects only scare readers and/or indicate that the author is scared of the respective concepts”. I don’t know if that’s what you had in mind here, too. But I don’t find this a good argument. I know somebody who promoted it to the extent of leaving away symbols that were absolutely necessary for a decent understanding of what is going on. I think nobody needs to be scared of a squiggle, and everybody should embrace a squiggle if it helps to distinguish what needs to be distinguished. (And who knows, in half a century from now we may well have to use baroque Chinese symbols anyway…)
That said, I’ll certainly accept if you’d rather not denote your categories by calligraphic font.
Urs, 6. This is I guess the opinion of people in Austalian school, Street has been explicit about it, making small letters for most abstract notions to show that they are less abstract. In some contexts this resulted in systematics and simple notations, as I was shown by one of his followers last year, who does it so well. On the other, hand in situations in which everything can be a roman letter, small or big, with occasionally few greeks, find difficult to sort out when there are many layers of abstraction..
But I don’t find this a good argument
I second that. I think hierarchy of different fonts when one goes deeper into abstraction is a good organizing principle.
Re #6: I’m pretty sure I’m personally responsible for mentioning this idea of Street’s either here or at the Café, and I do sometimes sympathize with it to some degree, even though I think Street sometimes carries the principle a little too far. (I’m not sure he himself ever referred to someone being “scared” of a concept, but he would aver that he thought someone who used a big fancy symbol might not be 100% comfortable with the concept it denoted, or was in some way in thrall to the concept, and sometimes I privately get the idea that’s indeed true of some people.) On the other hand, don’t even get me started on the emails of Jim Dolan, who is so extreme and eccentric in his pared-down notation (IMO) that I usually find them very hard to digest.
So much of this is an expression of personal style, which can develop and change over the years and decades. My growing tendency is to abbreviate less, and chart a middling course in elaborateness of notation. Someone whose notational style I generally find clean and attractive – pleasant to the eye – is Tom Leinster.
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