User talk:Thomasrwilson

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Math notation style and other conventions

Hello. I noticed your edits to great-circle distance. Someone apparently objected that they belong on the talk page. Before getting into content or taking sides in that discussion, I'd like to point out some things you'll need to know if you're editing Wikipedia articles:

• You should sign your names to comments on discussion pages, but NOT to your contributions to articles. If you click on "history" you get the article's edit history, which shows who computed what.
• You don't need to write things like x^2 + y^2. Instead you can write x² + y².
• Generally in non-TeX math notation you should italicize variables (as you see I did above) but NOT digits and NOT parentheses or other punctuation, and you should have a space before and after "+", "=", "<", ,etc. I prefer to make the spaces before and after "+", "−", and the like non-breakable, so that line-breaks won't interrupt the sum no matter what the geometry of the browser window. Also, there's a difference between

3 - 2

and

3 − 2

i.e. a minus sign is longer than a hyphen.

• Notice also:

|A dot B|

|A · B|

A X B

A × B

"×" differs from "X", and also from "x", and the dot character exists.

• For radicals, you can write √(x + 2), or you can resort to TeX and write

${\sqrt {x+2}}.\,$

I prefer to use TeX only in "displayed" mode and avoid it in "inline" mode because the characters often appear much bigger than in the surrounding text and get misaligned, often being much too high or too low or otherwise infelicitous.

• See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) for these and other related matters.

Michael Hardy (talk) 14:53, 29 July 2008 (UTC)