This review is for Sumaze! Menu Skip to content. Share this: Twitter Facebook Pinterest. Like this: Like Loading I had never thought of that before.. I like the word take for subtract — quick to say and obvious inverse of add.
I agree. Hi MathedUp. Talk to me Cancel reply. Get me SubscribedUp! Read previous post: Teacher Wellbeing Hack In order for us teachers to look after the wellbeing of our students, it is imperative that we first look Sumaze This review is for Sumaze! Show 9 more comments. Michael Hardy. So it seems that the concept is more important than how we say it.
Bouvet Island. Mark Bennet. Amongst the people I know it is normally read as "minus 5" and is a negative number. So if I want to communicate easily and efficiently to the people I know, I say "minus 5" because that is what they expect and understand. It isn't a question of mathematics so much as the way we use language to communicate. No need to clap But: I'm not a mathematician, I'm not a member of the French Academy or a grammarian to decide this.
Still I'd assume this has been codified somewhere for my language and for English as well. SE rather for Math. There are computer languages, where negation is not expressed by "minus" symbol! J is one example, Calc is another one. In both the way to write negative numbers is to put an underscore before the digits. Obviously, there's also a binary representation, which writes numbers in an even more different way.
So, even if historically both forms used to mean the same thing, to make it future-proof, it's better to distinguish between the two. David Wheeler. The distinction would be clear. Yes, I might. Shall we, then, now commence upon a discussion of just how many nanoseconds suffice to clarify? Really it's a matter of cracking an either side of egg Sniper Clown. This seems to me to be a distinction without a huge difference. Proof or find all reasons why not.
Language I come from Germany and there is no such distinction by language. You always say "minus 0. It's used like Minus 0. Zero is not strictly greater or less than zero. Elements in Space. I see it for the first time. Upcoming Events. Featured on Meta.
Now live: A fully responsive profile. The unofficial elections nomination post. Linked Related Hot Network Questions. Often preceded by , , , or : to be avoided, bad, difficult, disagreeable, painful, potentially damaging, unpleasant, unwanted. A rep performed with weight in which the muscle begins at maximum contraction and is slowly extended; a movement performed using only the eccentric phase of muscle movement.
Minus as a preposition informal : Without. Examples: "I walked out minus my coat''. Examples: "seven minus two is five" "ant plus". Examples: "a minus number". This went on until a professor pointed out to me some of the problems with this usage of the word negative. After all, whatever the object "negative x" is, it should at the very least be negative, right?
This has other harmful effects. Just last year, acting under these pernicious influences, I caught myself telling linear algebra students about the "existence and uniqueness of negatives in a vector space"! On the other hand the alternative, "minus x", is a straightfoward and unambiguous verbal description of the written form of the expression. One might argue that this is a trivial issue which is hardly worth the effort of discussion, but mathematicians prize clarity, and if one alternative is clearly better than the other, why not stick to it?
Another reason for using better terminology is that even though the underlying issues are trivial to us, they may not be clear to others. I distinctly recall being frustrated to tears at one point as a child, trying to understand how to add integers, and the phrase "negative one", etc. At the very least this discussion may be helpful for teaching mathematics to five year olds. The expression "negative x" is not some fictitious straw man of my own construction.
To the contrary, in my experience, it is the dominant verbal alternative. This turn of phrase even turns up in mathematical writing when authors decide not to assign a symbol to the mathematical object they are discussing. For example: "The 1-form is the negative of the differential of the function". It seems to me that the case for "minus x" is very strong, but I have nevertheless had a lot of difficulty winning people over to the "minus" side of the debate.
Some argue that saying "negative x" is logical because it describes the process of obtaining -x from x by mutliplying x by -1, which is a negative number. However this strikes me as a convoluted way of constructing terminology, and the argument does nothing to address the potential for confusion. I'll admit, there may be some arguments for "negative x" or against "minus x" which I haven't considered. One way to defend "minus x" against "negative x" is to say that "minus x" is short for "0 minus x".
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