• MBM@lemmings.world
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    3 days ago

    Mathematicians do weird stuff to get more letters, but I’ve never seen anyone use x and 𝑥 for different things

    • threelonmusketeers
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      2 days ago

      I’ve never seen anyone use x and 𝑥 for different things

      Yeah, me neither. I have had situations where I needed to distinguish between u, v, nu, and upsilon though. I had to be very careful with my handwriting that day…

    • joshthewaster@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      They also wouldn’t want to be ambiguous. If I was trying to write this problem the a, b, c… would get replaced by something like a_1, a_2,…, a_26 to be clearer. This problem works as a fun gotcha but isn’t something that would come up in the real world.