Notations Around the World: Census and Exploitation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collaborative census of mathematical notations worldwide to understand cultural diversity in mathematical expressions and supports educational tools by standardizing notation rendering.

Contribution

It presents a novel, collaborative approach to cataloging global mathematical notations, aiding cultural understanding and improving web-based mathematical rendering for educational purposes.

Findings

Created a comprehensive, multilingual notation census

Demonstrated the census's role in improving web rendering of formulas

Supported math education by contextualizing notation diversity

Abstract

Mathematical notations around the world are diverse. Not as much as requiring computing machines' makers to adapt to each culture, but as much as to disorient a person landing on a web-page with a text in mathematics. In order to understand better this diversity, we are building a census of notations: it should allow any content creator or mathematician to grasp which mathematical notation is used in which language and culture. The census is built collaboratively, collected in pages with a given semantic and presenting observations of the widespread notations being used in existing materials by a graphical extract. We contend that our approach should dissipate the fallacies found here and there about the notations in "other cultures" so that a better understanding of the cultures can be realized. The exploitation of the census in the math-bridge project is also presented: this project aims at taking learners "where they are in their math-knowledge" and bring them to a level ready to start engineering studies. The census serves as definitive reference for the transformation elements that generate the rendering of formul{\ae} in web-browsers.