Re: [math-fun] Simple EF

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003, Michael B Greenwald wrote:

Wed, 29 Oct 2003 21:36:25 -0500 (EST) John Conway <conway@Math.Princeton.EDU>

What we ought to do, is find an existing word that we can use to mean "positive or zero".

Is nonnegative (or non-negative) too ugly?

Well, yes, but that's not its worst defect. Two worse ones are that it defines a positive property as the negative of a negative one (ugh!), and that it doesn't work for general partial orders, for which "greater than or equals" doesn't mean the same as "not less than". What we need is a single word (behaving like "over") for the simple concet ">=", which would allow "over-zero" to substitute for the present "non-negative". John Conway