On Mar 24, 10:48 am, Jason Grout <jason-s...@creativetrax.com> wrote: > William Stein wrote: > > On Tue, Mar 24, 2009 at 9:58 AM, John H Palmieri <jhpalmier...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > >> Currently the latex methods for ZZ, RR, etc. all used mathbf -- plain > >> boldface -- rather than mathbb -- 'blackboard' bold. See also the (not > >> currently in use) file SAGE_ROOT/devel/sage/doc/common/macros.tex: > >> lots of mathbf, no mathbb. > > >> Is this an official style choice for Sage, or did it just > >> spontaneously occur? > > > I "officially" chose it for the same reason I chose mathbb in all the > > books/articles I wrote, which is that numerous people in publishing > > convinced me that it is a better choice. > > I'm curious what the persuasive reasoning was. I've always liked mathbb.
My impression is that people (maybe Bourbaki?) decided that bold-face should be used for Z, R, etc. Then people giving lectures wanted a way to reproduce this, so someone invented blackboard bold for use on a blackboard. And then the handwritten blackboard bold began to creep into printed material, and we now have mathbb. So to me it seems sort of backwards to use blackboard bold when you can use ordinary bold face. Also, Wikipedia claims that Serre disapproves of the use of blackboard bold in typesetting, and Serre's opinion carries some weight... John --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to sage-devel-unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
