MathGroup Archive 2013

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Notational Conventions

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg129974] Notational Conventions
  • From: Marsh <marshfeldman at gmail.com>
  • Date: Thu, 28 Feb 2013 21:28:22 -0500 (EST)
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Hello,

I am very new to Mathematica but see its potential. I'm unsure of how to combine text and Mathematica computations in a notebook so that the final document reads properly, and I haven't found a tutorial or any other help that covers this. A near as I can make out, one writes the document as if it were an ordinary word processing document, interspersing Mathematica calculations and commands, and then one collapses the cells that one does not want to display in the final document. Is this correct?

What I'd like to do is to adopt certain notational conventions and have mathematica deal with them correctly. For example, one set of conventions italicizes names of all variables, uses uppercase letters to name random variables and matrices, but distinguishes random variables from matrices by displaying all matrix names in boldface. A different set of conventions will use italicized uppercase letters to designate points in a diagram or constant parameters in an equation, with matrices now designated as uppercase letters with the dimensions of the matrix as a subscript (e.g., n x m).

Ideally, one would have a mathematical style sheet that makes changing the conventions used in a document. But even if one were to be willing to use a fixed notation in a document (notebook), I'm not sure how it would work. How does one use X to designate a random variable and bold X to designate a matrix? How does one use the Greek letter pi as a variable and have it show up in the document as the Greek letter rather than as the word "pi"?

So what's the best way to deal with these issues?



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