Magma has constructors which I find very useful, employing "|" for "such that"; [I haven't come across a "cupid" operator yet, but the manual is 5000 pages long, so I might have missed it ...] There doesn't seem to be any equivalent in Maple, which is a moderate nuisance. I'm constantly having to dream up contortions along the lines of max(seq( max(0, min(1, k - A[i]))*A[i], i = 1..nops(A))); say, to find the maximum element less than k of an array A of numbers. Then running it two or three times to debug it. The inconvenience is compounded by the remarkable "feature" that conditional expressions will compile, but only as the result of a function --- a syntactic blunder that leaves me lost for words. And by the way, there is no straightforward way to build the sequence element-by-element within a loop --- at least, there is, but it's horribly slow --- A := [op(A), x]; Instead the user is supposed to create a structure called a "table" to fill, maintaining a separate counter to index it, then convert it afterwards. Sigh! But perhaps I'm overlooking something. Has anybody out there found a good workaround? Fred Lunnon On 6/11/14, Marc LeBrun <mlb@well.com> wrote:
Two random math typography questions:
1. Any opinions on the best symbol for "such that"? I've seen colon, vertical-bar, and flipped-epsilon/member-of.
2. A colleague asks how to LaTex a symbol for "loves" (hey, it's about social discovery graphs) consisting of a heart overlaid with an arrow (left-to-right, or bidirectional when requited). Any recipes?
Thanks! If you prefer, feel free to just reply to me directly: mlb@well.com
_______________________________________________ math-fun mailing list math-fun@mailman.xmission.com https://mailman.xmission.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/math-fun