Carnival of Mathematics

Mark Chu-Carroll hosts the latest Carnival of Mathematics with a theme dear to my heart, the way cholesterol is: spam!

Among the notable posts are My Tiny Kingdom’s report on helping with long-division homework. This reminds me: can any of the other science-types out there who do math for a living tell me when was the last time you used the grade-school division symbol, or obelus, \div? Like writing in cursive, it seems to be a part of my symbolic heritage which adult life has discarded.

Also, Maths for Mortals has a challenge:

Does anyone know how to get the latex \quad and \begin{tabular} commands to work in WordPress?

Darn good question. I’m not hosted on WordPress.org, so I use the LatexRender plugin which I installed manually. The \quad command works for me, but only within expressions, and I suspect the issue with the tabular environment is that it’s not designed to be used within math mode.

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5 Responses to “Carnival of Mathematics”

  1. The HTML character entity “divide” (”÷”) also produces the division character, ÷. Cool for blog posts…

    Cheers, Julian

    Julian M Bucknall said this on October 19th, 2007 at 17:10 pm

  2. Good point. I obviously had LaTeX on the brain.

    Blake Stacey said this on October 19th, 2007 at 17:15 pm

  3. That’s a good question…

    even my students (college freshmen, for the most part) don’t use the ÷ symbol. So apparently it gets abandoned sometime before then.

    I actually have started using cursive in the last couple years; I go back and forth between cursive and printing fairly freely in handwritten documents that are meant for my eyes only. (Those are most of the handwritten things I produce these days; I type pretty much anything that’s meant for other people’s consumption.) I don’t really know why. It’s especially strange because my cursive is not all that readable. I suspect writing cursive is marginally faster than printing, though.

    Isabel said this on October 19th, 2007 at 17:49 pm

  4. Thanks for the shout out. In addition (ha!) to being unable to do simple math, I find it easier to scan and upload drawings of symbols than to find a plugin or something to make everything look all professional.

    Anne Glamore said this on October 19th, 2007 at 18:26 pm

  5. I too stopped using the division sign, I would estimate, in middle school. I am not an accountant, so I don’t know if accountants really “use” it (I don’t think they really write equations that much anyway), but it does appear in many accounting standards (though not uniformly).

    nicole said this on October 19th, 2007 at 18:59 pm