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Comment by yau8edq12i

1 year ago

As a mathematician, I have never, ever seen the equal sign used to denote proportionality. I cannot tell what you mean by "identity" that wouldn't be equality. And a definition in the sense you seem to mean is, indeed, also an equality. I guess this issue not mentioned in the paper because it doesn't exist.

I agree it’s not really used symbolically, but isn’t it referring to the difference between, say:

(x + y)(x - y) = x^2 - y^2

(an identity, since it’s true for every x and every y) and something more arbitrary like

3x^2 + 2x - 7 = 0

(an equation certainly not valid for all x and whose solutions are sought).

Of course, really, the first one is a straightforward equality missing some universal quantification at the front… so maybe that’s just what the triple equals sign would be short for in this case.

[x:y] = [lx:ly]

and I suppose the model of localization discussed in the article above counts as well.

  • ... What? That's just symbol soup. What are you trying to write? Do it in latex if it helps.

    • It's not symbol soup, it's projective coordinates. Did you claim to be a mathematician? I merely have a PhD in Mathematics and a few papers in peer-review journals, so, unlike you, not a real mathematician, and I immediately understood the point.

      1 reply →

    • I used l instead of \lambda, my bad I guess. My point was that the equality sign = is used to denote equality between projective points [x:y] = [ax:ay] and also proportionality between the ordered pairs [x:y] = [ax:ay], just depending on how you read and understand it.

      I later remembered fractions a/b = ac/bc work this way too!