Hi, English isn’t my mother tongue so I was asking myself that question since I first encounted a w/… Back then I was like: “What tf does ‘w slash’ stand for?” And when I found out I was like “How, why, and is it any intuitive?” But I never dared to ask that until now

  • Rentlar@lemmy.ca
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    4
    arrow-down
    1
    ·
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    Mathematicians didn’t want to write a conclusion paragraph to their proofs to say that that result proves what they wanted to show, so they just put “QED” at the end which is some Latin/Greek phrase to the effect.

    Then they got too lazy to write that because they do proofs all the time, so they just put a box ∎ that means “so, basically yeah. there you have it.”