I like to go upper left to lower right, then upper right to lower left. My point, though, is that I just write an “x” as I normally would, without attempting to make it more italic. (I write using sloped, joined-up letters anyway.)
I wonder if some students are consciously trying to imitate printed text, in which there is definitely a clear italic vs roman distinction? Not to mention Kurrentschrift. Which brings to mind the reverse phenomenon, origin of many standard mathematical symbols, from an integral-sign “s” to Blackboard Bold…
I was taught to write the lower-case letter x that way (like two back-to-back curves). I actually don’t know how I write it now - I would have to try writing it to find out, and even then I wouldn’t fully trust the result as it could be very context-dependent.
I mean, I was explicitly taught in secondary school ‘we write x in algebra this way, formed from two curved lines’ - it was a maths/physics convention that was distinct from the teaching of handwriting in general (which we had learned earlier in primary school).
I remember an unrelated, but somewhat similar moment learning handwriting in primary school where we were encouraged to start writing the number 8 using a single stroke instead of writing it as one circle stacked on another.
A cross also denotes multiplication in scientific notation (eg. 6.02 × 1023), although it’s unlikely to be confused with a letter x in that context.
I guess in handwriting I distinguish a letter “x” from a multiplication cross by writing the cross smaller and raised above the baseline compared to the letter, but I can see that a clearer way to distinguish them might be useful.
Another Australian.
I remember making a number of specific changes to how I wrote things when in undergraduate mathematics. I don’t remember if x was one of them, or whether that was already ingrained, but ensuring things were clearly distinguished mattered. I started to cross my sevens and Zs. Plus took care over Greek letters. A cross product \times needs to be clearly different to an x.
My handwriting has always been awful, so I needed everything to help legibility.
Aleph I never got right. Just a big N with some squiggles.
Depends. I found it helped parsing expressions. Visually clarity in the symbols used made a difference. Lower case letters generally have a default type system associated with them. Depends on context, but ambiguity in a symbol, even if there is only one sensible meaning still made one’s head hurt.
Is wxy the product of w and y, or is it the product of w, x, and y?
When I’m writing on the board, I also make sure that my 't’s have a hooked tail, and my lowercase 'l’s are cursive. I also got into the habit of always putting a tail on ‘u’, to distinguish it from the union symbol, though that one’s not as relevant at the high school level.
Now if only there were a good trick for distinguishing the capital and lowercase letters that look the same. That can be an issue with, for instance, the Law of Sines: “Solve for C in this triangle”.
What are w, x, and y? wxy making sense in context indicates they are some kind of vectors and you consider their cross product? In which case you would probably denote the tensor product as w\otimes x \otimes y instead of just wxy. On the other hand, if they are elements of, say, a multiplicative group, you would write wy or w\cdot y, never w\times y. Or whatever, mutatis mutandis. I have seen people write things like \vec w \times \vec y where the arrow in this case emphasizes the quantities are vectors.
They don’t look at all the same when I write them, because the C I would write as a monumental capital while the c as a medial “script” letter with the relevant initial stroke (mirroring somewhat the printed “italic” style, at least morally)
OK…that’s about how I’ve always written a lower-case “x.”
No, not a mathematician, nor a logician, nor any of their subsidiary practical fields, although I’ve done my share of undergraduate coursework in the arts and sciences related to those diverse disciplines.
Don’t know how or when I started writing it like that, but it seemed to make sense.
Always cross the “7,” the “z,” “foot” and little thing on the numeral “1.”
Never was taught the fancy cursive as a child…rather, I think it was the Palmer method we used (not sure…that simple new-age one that all the kids were crazy about back in the day)…and have never, ever used any type of cursive in handwriting. A legible scrawl with admirably regular strokes.
Standard American public elementary school education, and all that. Used to know some ancient Greek, maybe…not sure what role that played: likely none.
just straight lines intersecting? Probably as a child didn’t care for the way it looked…kind of stark…and then as an older student, you know, cross-product and such enters into it, so I saw no reason to introduce more confusion into my notations.
To add another element to the story, a capital “X” (written like the letter) is also how people in Germany, including myself, typically mark their ballot paper in elections, or tick boxes in forms.
The calculator program that came with my operating system does it the opposite way. I type in a slash / and it displays an obelus ÷. OK, the button on the calculator image has an obelus, but I never use that; always use the keyboard.
As far as multiplication symbol, I’m a good programmer and use an asterisk *. The calculator has the × symbol, but I always type an * and of course it displays an ×.
Regarding the discussion aout writing Greek letters - I remember a comment once that it is almost impossible to decipher Cyrillic in cursive.
I’ve also trained myself to wite the 7 with a cross, and also the letter Z when printed to distinguish it from 2. As I understand, crossing the 7 is important in Europe because the tendency there is to make the 1 where the top diagonal upstroke is far more pronounced, so it is easier to mistake for a 7. Similarly, unless you make a very obvious top corner, 2 and Z are easy to confuse.
Same here. It’s generally the way shown to mark a ballot, although technically any mark that shows which choice you selected is acceptable. When counting ballots, I hold them up and the scrutineer for each party can look and either agree or dispute. Some people use a check mark (rarely) like a “V” with a long tail to the right.
But that doesn’t look the the “x” described in the OP, which is two c’s back to back, more or less.
Anyhow, American here. We were not taught to differentiate our algebraic x. We just wrote it how we would normally write our x. I cant remember ever using “x” to indicate multiplication in my algebra or calculus classes. We used a dot. Maybe in scientific notation, but that notation was almost only seen in science classes.
I was grading a college course once where one of the students used Cyrillic letters for the auxiliary variables he introduced. OK, fine, auxiliary variables often make an answer more concise, and by using Cyrillic, he avoided ever using the same letters that were already in the problem… except that I didn’t realize that Ш and Щ were different letters.
I am not even consistent. Maybe half the time I use the method described in the OP, but the other half, I will make an elongated s from upper left to lower right, followed by a simple crossing line from upper right to lower left. What I never do is just two straight lines crossing. The \times is used for several other things, the most important being cartesian product.
When I make them the \xi and \zeta look entirely different.
I once heard a lecture by the Russian mathematician Matyesevich (not sure how to spell it) who wrote a formula involving 26 variables. He explained that the formula originally involved 32 variables but he had worked hard to get it down to 26 so he could write it using only lower case roman letters. I don’t know about Cyrillic.
I am sure you do. However, some people:
You can see many potential avenues of confusion, even more so if you consider Greek vs. Latin, combined with slightly messy handwriting…
Sometimes people put in a little extra effort to get such formulae:
