I am giving a presentation tonight, and the mathematical terms x’ and x’’ feature heavily in it. I pronounce them as “x-dash” and “x-dash-dash”, but this gets a bit tiresome by the end of the presentation.
A - Am I correct in pronouncing them this way?
B - Is there an alternative way of saying x’ and x’’ that is less of a mouthful?
“x prime” and “x prime prime” (or “x double-prime”)
X prime, X double-prime.
I have never heard anything but “X prime”, and “X double prime”.
Wikipedia’s article on the prime symbol
Out of curiosity, what’s the context?
I am presenting one of these…
X prime and X optimus prime.
X-prime, meaning “the first derivative of x”.
X-double-prime, meaning “the second derivative of x”.
Is this what you mean by x’ and x’’?
x’ is an acute accented x
x’’ is a very strongly acute accented x
or more likely
“x prime” and “x double-prime”
Sometimes primes are used just to indicate different variables of the same type. Differentiation is not necessarily implied.
Yes, especially in computer science. You see the prime notation a lot in things like exchange arguments. “Given some edge, e, assume there is an edge e’ such that…”
You’ll see it sometimes in stuff dealing with languages with pattern matching too:
Fixpoint sum (list : natlist) : nat :=
match list with
| cons x list' => x + sum list'
| nil => 0
end.
This is the context I am using, e.g.: "from point x to x’ ". No derivatives are implied.
Sounds like “prime” is the correct pronunciation,.
Prime is what I would say. FWIW, most people think of a hyphen (-) when one says “dash.” Or the similar printers’ em and en dashes.
Joining the chorus, I’ll also say that it’s certainly “X-prime” and “X-double-prime” (or, less commonly, “X-prime-prime”). There might be some uncommon usage that’s read differently, but I can’t think of any exceptions offhand. Reading them as ‘dash’ probably wouldn’t be understood.
I changed it to “x-prime”. But I think it may be an americanism. “x-dash” is acceptable in the in UK (the talk was in the US so changing to “x-prime” was right).
I’ve had British math and physics professors and they always said “prime.” Of course they were teaching in the US, so who knows.
“x prime” and “x double-prime”, like everyone else has been saying. It’s usually clear from the context whether x is being differentiated (in the calculus sense of the word “differentiate”).
A college friend who grew up on a farm and associated priming with pumps always referred to them as “X-pumped” and “X-double-pumped.” I don’t recommend doing this in your presentation; stick with “-prime” and “double-prime.”