Science Memes

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So much (mander.xyz)

submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I don't think you can use the x0 plus minus delta in the bracket (or anywhere), because then the function that's 1 on the rationals and 0 on the irrationals is continuous, because no matter what positive number epsilon is, you can pick delta=7 and x0 plus minus delta is exactly as rational as x0 is so the distance to L is zero, so under epsilon.

You have to say that
whenever |x - 0x|<delta,
|f(x) - L|<epsilon.

But I think this is one of my favourite memes.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 months ago (1 children)

unless f(x~0~ ± δ) is some kind of funky shorthand for the set { f(x) : x ∈ ℝ, | x - x~0~ | < δ }. in that case, the definition would be “correct”.

it’s much more likely that it’s a typo, but analysts have been known to cook up some pretty bizarre notation from time to time, so it’s not totally out of the question.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

There's notation for that - (x0 - δ, x0 + δ), so you could say
f(x0 - δ, x0 + δ) ⊂ (L - ε, L + ε)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

that would be a lot clearer. i’ve just been burned in the past by notation in analysis.

my two most painful memories are:

in the (baby) rudin textbook, he uses f(x+) to denote the limit of _f _from the right, and f(x-) to denote the limit of f from the left.
in friedman analysis textbook, he writes the direct sum of vector spaces as M + N instead of using the standard notation M ⊕ N. to make matters worse, he uses M ⊕ N to mean M is orthogonal to N.

there’s the usual “null spaces” instead of “kernel” nonsense. ive also seen lots of analysis books use the → symbol to define functions when they really should have been using the ↦ symbol.

at this point, i wouldn’t put anything past them.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago

Egregious. I feel your pain.