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Posted by Toby Inkster on 09/30/06 10:06
Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> (I'll skip the issue that real mathematicians seldom use square roots.
> Real mathematicians live in abstract spaces and seldom use numbers or
> specific algebraic functions. ;-) )
Depends on the field they work in. People dealing with sets,
rings and fields are very unlikely to come across a square root
in their day to day work. People who work in cryptography
though are more likely to deal with more concrete functions,
including square roots.
n-th roots (which would need to be represented similarly in a
typographical sense) pop up all over the place when dealing with
n-dimentional spaces, including the 4-dimentional space-time of
which Einstein was rather fond, and the cutting-edge string
theories currently proposed in the world of physics, which
operate on a universe with up to 11 dimensions.
I think ultimately the best solution, if at all possible, is
to store the equation in some machine-intelligible format on
the server and serve it up as an image, as MathML, as HTML or
as something else depending on client capabilities and
preferences.
--
Toby A Inkster BSc (Hons) ARCS
Contact Me ~ http://tobyinkster.co.uk/contact
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