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Message from MKM: Mathematical Units

James Davenport gave a talk on mathematical units in OpenMath.

New to me was the discussion on whether and when CDs/ units/ notations are obsolete (e.g. out-of-date)

  • OpenMath CD is obsolete if the definition in it are for archival purposes only.
  • A unit is obsolete by formal change (e.g. liter_pre1964) and by usage.

Or to distinguish relative and absolute temperatures … for addition “abs”+”rel”=”abs” (not arith1-plus?) …

Units are also very interesting in making mathematical expressions more intuitive and context-dependent. Maybe: A renderer converting from 1.2 miles (English) to (ca.) 1,92 km (German) should also convert the units and thus needs to provide basic computations (e.g. from miles to km)?

This entry was posted by Christine on Tuesday, July 29th, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Conferences, CoP, CoPs in Math. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Message from MKM: Mathematical Units”

  1. Oleg Lobachev’s Haskellblag » Blog Archive » Physics, and types, and notation, and ambiguity, and… says:
    July 29, 2008 at 1:15 pm

    [...] leads to a utter confusion. The talk by J. Davenport was very enjoyable, by the way. So people blog on it, and the talk just ended! So I expect even more blog entries on [...]

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