On Mar 25, 6:05 am, Henryk Trappmann <bo198...@googlemail.com> wrote: > Because Bourbaki and Serre said so? > Sorry guys but thats the strangest justificiation Iv ever heard.
I don't know quite where you heard it, because it's not what I wrote, especially the part about Bourbaki. However, if a leading mathematician like Serre expresses an opinion about something, I think it's worth paying attention. For what it's worth, Knuth also seems to dislike the use of blackboard bold fonts in printed material, and he's probably thought more about technical typesetting than all of us put together. I think it's dangerous to dismiss his view without further consideration. I haven't heard about Bourbaki expressing a preference for mathbf over mathbb. The way I understand it, Bourbaki may have been the ones who popularized the use of bold face for Z, R, etc., and this was before blackboard bold existed. Mathematicians liked this bold face notation enough that someone invented blackboard bold for handwritten use. People became so used to seeing it in lectures and so on that they created computer fonts to replicate it. That is, blackboard bold was invented as a substitute for bold when bold was not available. From this point of view, preferring blackboard bold over plain bold is like preferring margarine to butter. I also happen to think that bold looks better: it fits with the roman and italic fonts better. Unambiguity of mathbb is worth something, but I don't recall ever being confused by a bold face Z or R or ... By the way, widespread use is not a convincing argument; many people use Z_p to represent the integers mod p, and I will *not* agree that this is acceptable usage. 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
