[seqfan] Re: Naming advice

[Neil Sloane]

For my part,  I much prefer a simple and precise definition
that refers to an existing sequence over a long and usually imprecise
description in words.


Best regards
Neil

Neil J. A. Sloane, President, OEIS Foundation.
11 South Adelaide Avenue, Highland Park, NJ 08904, USA.
Also Visiting Scientist, Math. Dept., Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ.
Phone: 732 828 6098; home page: http://NeilSloane.com
Email: njasloane at gmail.com



On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 9:50 PM Allan Wechsler <acwacw at gmail.com> wrote:

> I could have sworn that I had seen some fairly-authoritative guidance that
> deprecated the use of sequence cross-references in names and brief
> descriptions. If this memory is mistaken, then Robert Israel's
> straightforward suggestion is appealing.
>
> Peter Luschny's notational variant is attractive in a formalistic way, but
> has the disadvantage of introducing a new formalism that a lot of users are
> unlikely to know.
>
> Marc LeBrun's suggestion has some of the flavor I was looking for in a
> crossreferenceless name, but drops the useful information that the
> reconstruction is not simply "a" factorial, but is in fact the factorial of
> the sequence index.
>
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2019 at 2:26 PM Peter Luschny <peter.luschny at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > >
> > > RI>  I think clarity is better than catchiness, and I don't agree that
> > "we
> > > don't
> > > RI>  like to see sequence numbers in the names of other sequences".
> There
> > > are
> > > RI>  lots of sequences with sequence numbers in their names.
> > > RI>  My suggestion would be
> > > RI>        a(n) is the unique k such that A108951(k) = n!.
> > >
> >
> > I very much agree with this. Let's write
> >
> > a(n) = ℩k (A108951(k) = n!)
> >
> > ℩ is the iota operator (the Unicode Character 'turned greek small letter
> > iota' (U+2129). [see https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2100.pdf ]
> >
> > I love this notation ever since I read Principia Mathematica. But
> > probably too much of a hope in an ASCII destroyed world.
> >
> > Cheers, Peter
> >
> > --
> > Seqfan Mailing list - http://list.seqfan.eu/
> >
>
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