I hate it when people prounce ln as lawn

[DeadWolfe]

I hate it when people prounce ln as "lawn"

It's bad enough writing ln instead of log, but pronouncing it ln is just too far.

 

[Math Is Hard]

oh, dear. I had a philosophy professer once who used to talk about Leonhard Yoooler in his lectures. Man, that drove me nuts. He was probably doing it on purpose.

 

[arildno]

Yes, to prounce words wrongly, is almost as bad as spelling mistales..

 

[Math Is Hard]

I suppose if you prowl about, pouncing on words, that would be prouncing!

 

[enigma]

Heh. I had a physics prof who pronounced 'square root' as squirt. He used a lot of MATLAB...

Made me chuckle every time.

 

[HallsofIvy]

One thing that drives me crazy is the number of students who don't use "ln" but rather "In" for natural log!

 

[arildno]

Heh. I had a physics prof who pronounced 'square root' as squirt. He used a lot of MATLAB...
Made me chuckle every time.

He sounds like a dry stick.

 

[uart]

One thing that drives me crazy is the number of students who don't use "ln" but rather "In" for natural log!

Funny you should say that becausing just a few days ago I was teaching my nephew about log's and was showing him over the log, 10^x, ln and e^x buttons on his calculator. You know the very first thing he said when I pointed out the ln button is "Oh, I always wondered what that button was, I thought it was In".

So my guess is that this misconception is probably arising for the way "ln" is marked on most calculators. At the time I was thinking it might be better if they used a capital L, like "Ln", even though it's not standard at least it would be easy to distingish it from an "I".

 

[iNCREDiBLE]

Heh. I had a physics prof who pronounced 'square root' as squirt. He used a lot of MATLAB...
Made me chuckle every time.

Had a prof in math who pronounced it squirt too

 

[Curious3141]

Mea culpa. I guess.
I mean that I'm one of those who writes nat logs as 'ln' and pronounces it 'lawn'. The abbreviation 'ln' is accepted notation for the nat log, even though some sticklers (like yourself) get all huffy about it. Log often means common log by default in layman oriented contexts, but in math professional contexts, it means the natural log. To avoid confusion I prefer to adopt the notation 'lg' for base 10 logs, while keeping 'ln' for base e. Of course, the ideal situation would be to write the base as a subscript all the time, but it's bleeding tedious isn't it ?

Pronouncing 'ln' "lawn" is also fairly common. Others would say "Ell En", some would just say "log". There's no rigid rule about this.

 

[Nomy-the wanderer]

It's "len" here...

 

[Doodle Bob]

Mea culpa. I guess.
I mean that I'm one of those who writes nat logs as 'ln' and pronounces it 'lawn'. The abbreviation 'ln' is accepted notation for the nat log, even though some sticklers (like yourself) get all huffy about it.

Actually, the 'n' in 'Ln' stands for Napier, although more and more people seem to be forgetting that and assuming that it stands for natural.

 

[mezarashi]

I was taught to pronounce things like "ln 3" as "lawn three". The same guy also taught me to call Euler "oiler" and Cauchy" koochie". I would think having to say something like "natural log of three" every time you run into "log base e's" would be hassleful. Isn't "log" itself an abbreviation of the full thing?

 

[Muzza]

Actually, the 'n' in 'Ln' stands for Napier, although more and more people seem to be forgetting that and assuming that it stands for natural.

Do you have a source for this?

 

[Pseudo Statistic]

I was taught to pronounce things like "ln 3" as "lawn three". The same guy also taught me to call Euler "oiler" and Cauchy" koochie". I would think having to say something like "natural log of three" every time you run into "log base e's" would be hassleful. Isn't "log" itself an abbreviation of the full thing?

Yeah, I always thought "Euler" was pronounced "Yooler" and "Cauchy" was pronounced "Cocky"... :\
"Ell En" for me...

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

yes i also thought euler should be pronounce as europe or eulogy, how did he dare not to?! (-:

 

[MathematicalPhysicist]

btw, here israelis pronounce ln as lan.
needless to say that someone who knows a little bit about computers thinks that it's awfull.

 

[mezarashi]

Actually, the 'n' in 'Ln' stands for Napier, although more and more people seem to be forgetting that and assuming that it stands for natural.

According to this site, ln would come from "log naturalis", which would make more sense. I have to admit that reading on how Napier and Briggs pioneered the logarithm is just amazing. Many other cool things about mathematical history here as well.

http://www.pballew.net/arithme1.html

Abscissa is the formal term for the x-coordinate of a point on a coordinate graph. The abscissa of the point (3,5) is three. The word is a conjunction of ab(remove) + scindere (tear). Literally then, to tear or cut apart, as a line perpendicular to the x-axis would do to the coordinate plane. The main root is closely related to the Latin root from which we get the word scissors. Leibniz apparently coined the mathematical use of the term around 1692.

*sweat*

 

[gravenewworld]

I hate how in some math classes log actually means ln.

 

[Gokul43201]

I hate how in some math classes log actually means ln.

Infidel !

And mez : "koochie" is just, plain sacrilege ! Just for the record, it's more like koh-shee.

 

[mattmns]

I say "Ell En" or "natural log". I have heard lawn before, but I just don't like it.

 

[eax]

How do you pronounce "ln"? This was recently introduced and people in my class are already making assumptions on shortcuts of what to call it instead of "natural logarythm function"

 

[hypermorphism]

How do you pronounce "ln"? This was recently introduced and people in my class are already making assumptions on shortcuts of what to call it instead of "natural logarythm function"

Just pronounce it by letters (Ell-En) or, given that it is the most commonly used logarithm, just say "logarithm". For less common logarithms, you can just use "logarithm in base blah".

 

[Math Is Hard]

Infidel !
And mez : "koochie" is just, plain sacrilege ! Just for the record, it's more like koh-shee.

Koochie!?

*falls out of chair giggling*

Something that used to bug me in some of my math classes is when people would say "root two" instead of the square root of two. That just really, really bugged me. It was just as if they assumed we would know they meant a square root rather than a cube root or a fourth root etc.

I need a life.

 

[iNCREDiBLE]

Koochie!?
*falls out of chair giggling*
Something that used to bug me in some of my math classes is when people would say "root two" instead of the square root of two. That just really, really bugged me. It was just as if they assumed we would know they meant a square root rather than a cube root or a fourth root etc.
I need a life.

Well... Here in Sweden "root of two" implicitly means "square root of two" since square root is the most ordinary root.

 

[Math Is Hard]

Well... Here in Sweden "root of two" implicitly means "square root of two" since square root is the most ordinary root.

Heck, they didn't even say "root of two" as you Swedes do - just "root two"!

 

[gazzo]

Yesterday our lecturer pronounced Galois as GAL-WAH, is that how it's meant to be said?

 

[iNCREDiBLE]

Yesterday our lecturer pronounced Galois as GAL-WAH, is that how it's meant to be said?

Yes. Take a look at http://www.answers.com/topic/galois-theory". You can even click on the sound button to hear how it's pronounced.

 

[Gokul43201]

Yesterday our lecturer pronounced Galois as GAL-WAH, is that how it's meant to be said?

Don't have sound on this computer...I'd say it's more like GAHL-wah.

 

[Icebreaker]

Yesterday our lecturer pronounced Galois as GAL-WAH, is that how it's meant to be said?

Yes, it's how you pronounce it. Gah-loo-ah.

French high schoolers in Canada pronounce "ln" as "el-en", where "en" is similar to "end" and not "english". This was quite confusing when I started university, since I was the only one saying "el-en", which other students pronounced as "lawn"; and worse, the professor preferred "log" to either. It's hard to keep track of them sometimes.

What's the exact pronounciation of "Cauchy"? One of my professors says "Coo-shee", another says "Cow-shee"; "Coo-chee" and "Cow-chee" were floating around, too.