[om] Newbie questions on the meaning of the Attribution Element

[Professor James Davenport]

On Sun, 12 Jan 2003, Richard Fateman wrote:
> Cem Karan wrote:
> The notion that one can communicate higher mathematics by some
> kind of appeal to comments like "cos means the cosine function"
> is hardly supportable, in my opinion.  On the other hand, reducing
True - one would hardly like to - see the SIGSAM Bulletin article on 
arccot, or anything on Bessel functions.
> cosine to an encoding based on naive set theory is pretty painful
Equally true.
> too.  The best way I know of is to refer to it as "cos means
> the same as cos in maple.".  That, of course, would be unacceptable
> to the un-maple crowd. ... RJF
Actually, the transc1 CD defines it as (exp(ix)+exp(-ix))/2.
exp is currently a primitive, but I am working on technology to define it 
as the solution of exp'=exp; exp(0)=1.
However, I propose to lease 'ODEsolution' as primitive. The real point is 
to have as few primitives as practicable.
James
--
om at openmath.org  -  general discussion on OpenMath
Post public announcements to om-announce at openmath.org
Automatic list maintenance software at majordomo at openmath.org
Mail om-owner at openmath.org for assistance with any problems