Is this a British thing or something? People trying to be cute?

fuzzyfelt

Their language wants for naught.

Danger

Is that just a coincidence, or are you crossing threads here?

Office_Shredder

Deja vu?

Danger

Oh, great... now that's three threads. Thanks a lot, Shedder...

Office_Shredder

Let the record show that was a legitimate question. Any resemblance to posts in other threads is not coincidental.

fuzzyfelt

Intentional, and also wondering if objections to "maths" and not "naught" are inconsistent, considering the OP's username.

fuzzyfelt

Dembadon

I actually think "maths" makes more sense. (see Dickfore's post)

Math, to me, would be the logical shortening of Mathematic, which isn't a word.

By omitting the apostrophe in math's, one clears up any potential confusion with whether or not the noun is intended to be possessive; however, if the intention is to make the word possessive, one would then need to consider whether or not to write math's or maths's.

Jimmy Snyder

They say physics too.

Office_Shredder

It would be maths'

When you shorten a word do you always leave the last letter on?

Math is an actual shorter version of mathematics, similar to 'lab' for 'laboratory' or 'info' for 'information' or 'limo' for 'limousine.

A couple more examples since I found a website listing them: 'sax' for 'saxophone', 'vet' for 'veteran' or 'veterinarian', 'vocab' for 'vocabulary'.

Jimmy Snyder

Would you say mathematics is beautiful, or mathematics are beautiful?

Danger

That would depend upon whether you define "mathematics" as "an intellectual pursuit" or as "a bunch of Hooters waitresses". (Come to think of it, one Hooters waitress would still be properly referred to in the plural...)

Jimmy Snyder

I can't say. Hooters is too expensive for me.

Danger

Don't you mean "are", or are you referring to the establishment?

Oh hell, I have to log off now. As a last thought, it always seemed to me that the term "maths" indicated several different branches of mathematics, such as trig, algebra, etc. combined.

Dembadon

That's an interesting question. In my experience, mathematics is typically referred to as a single entity, governing all fields/subjects. Since the word can also be used when referring to a single field, it seems that the verb "are" would be permissible in certain cases. I guess its use, in that sense, would be contextually dependent.

Office_Shredder

People only use the word 'are' when trying to justify their usage of the word "maths"

Jonathan Scott

I'm English and I use "maths" as short for "mathematics" and "math" as short for "mathematical", for example as in "math symbol", "math notation" or "math font".

(At school, we called it "mathma" anyway).