User talk:Fly by Night/Archive Apr 10

Harmonic differential
I made some style changes to your article harmonic differential, and I had some comments that may make article editing easier for you in the future. You may not know about the templates nowrap, nowrap begin, and nowrap end, but they make non-breaking spaces much easier to read. Usually we don't use periods for multiplication; instead we use nothing or we use &middot;. The HTML entity  inserts a small space which is very useful for spacing differentials. We don't usually italicize Greek letters: &omega;, not &omega;. You can find all of this at Manual of Style (mathematics).

Finally, I noticed that you prefer to write differentials with a roman d (as in dx, not dx). Where did you learn this? I've only ever seen this done on Wikipedia, and I'm curious to know where it comes from. Ozob (talk) 04:11, 22 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the improvements to the article, and thanks for the template tips. I'll make sure to use them soon. As for the Roman and italic d, it's just a matter of style. Some people write dx because the think of d as an operator, and the operator is applied to x. Others write dx because they treat dx like a variable in some sense, and ignore the idea of d as an operator. The Royal Society Proceedings Series A (Mathematical and Physical Sciences) have a style file (rspublic.cls) to be used in all of its published articles that specifically defines a macro to use for the differential which uses a Roman d: \newcommand{\rd}{\mathrm{d}} %Roman d for differential. •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:39, 22 April 2010 (UTC)


 * Ah! Hmm.  On the other hand, they also suggest a Roman i for the imaginary unit and a Roman e for the base of the natural logarithm. I'm not aware of anyone using either of those.  The relevant style guideline here is probably WP:RETAIN, which tells me that I can't edit an article specifically to change dx to dx, nor can you edit it to go the other way; the style may be changed only for consistency's sake.  (I should mention that I usually think of d as an operator, the exterior derivative, but I still prefer it in italics: Most single letter operators are written in italic, as in f, g, T, and so on.)
 * But you weren't aware of anyone (outside of Wikipedia) using a Roman d for differential, so there's no reason to assume that you would be aware of any other notational conventions. •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:55, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
 * I prefer raised asterisks because they're semantically correct and because in the right font an unraised asterisk will give an expression that does not make sense, such as $$\omega*\,$$. But of course they compromise the beauty of the expression.  I don't think there's an established rule for this one, but I'll defer to you for this article since you're its first major contributor. Ozob (talk) 04:39, 23 April 2010 (UTC)
 * If I were to have used LaTeX coding, i.e. $$$$ then I would have used the command \omega^*, but I didn't, I used HTML, so I used ω*, instead of the ω* (ω*) which you prefer. I don't know why you decided to arrive on my talk page and start nit picking; but I'd prefer that you left me in peace to edit. Article talk pages are the place for this kind of talk. Thank you. •• Fly by Night (talk) 18:55, 27 April 2010 (UTC)