Am Freitag 08 Mai 2009 13:23:09 schrieb Wolfgang Jeltsch:
Am Donnerstag, 7. Mai 2009 14:42 schrieb Daniel Fischer:
Of course, if centuries ago people had decided to write the argument before the function, composition would've been defined the other way round. They haven't.
Algebraists used to write x f instead of f(x) at least in the 1980s.
I think that should read *some* algebraists... Though I had no contact with algebraists in the 1980s, if that practice had been ubiquitous among them, I would have expected it to show up in the textbooks. I've never seen it in an algebra book, nor was it used in any algebra lecture I attended in the 1990s, so I doubt it was very widespread. Don't get me wrong, that notation does make sense and has some advantages over the conventional one, I wouldn't oppose a change, though it would take some time to get used to it. All I'm saying is that the overwhelming majority of mathematicians doesn't use it.
I think, also category theorists often wrote (write?) composition with the first morphism on the left, i.e., “the other way round”.
Yeah, I heard that, too. It's a field where the advantages of postfix notation show clearly and a young one, so for them it was relatively easy to switch. You'd have a hard time persuading the statisticians and analysts, though.
Best wishes, Wolfgang
Cheers, Daniel