# Pronunciation Problem

1. Jul 19, 2007

### chrisych

Can anyone tell me how to pronounce the following symbols?

cosh, sinh and the gradient (the up-side-down delta).

2. Jul 19, 2007

### Gib Z

Full names would be Hyperbolic Cosine, Hyperbolic Sine, and the backward difference operator.

3. Jul 19, 2007

### HallsofIvy

Staff Emeritus
The pronuciations "cosh" and "sinch" are commonly used. (In my Freshman calculus class the instructor said "sinus hyperbolicus"!)

The gradient operator (not the "backward difference operator") is commonly pronounced "grad" or "del" (that's more general, for example $\nabla f$ is "grad f" or "del f" while $\nabla \cdot \vec{f}$ is "div f" or "del dot f" and $\nabla \times \vec{f}$ is "curl f" or "del cross f" . Technically, it's a "nabla". In order to get that symbol in the tex above, I used "\nabla".

Last edited: Jul 19, 2007
4. Jul 19, 2007

### neutrino

I was taught 'cosh' and 'shine'. (If you're wondering, hyperbolic tangent was 'than' )

5. Jul 19, 2007

### CompuChip

"Sinus hyperbolicus" is what I call it too, but not in English

Now if only you have used "\times" to get the cross symbol ... :tongue2:

6. Jul 19, 2007

### K.J.Healey

Nabla! Thats great. A hebrew word for a type of harp or so I wiki.

When I read words to myself "cosh" and "sinh"
I SAY "Cosine" and then THINK "hyperbolic";
same with the Sin(h). Its weird.
I never actually used them in a sentence when alone. If talking ot someone else I say hyperbolic sine.

7. Jul 19, 2007

### GoldPheonix

...

Are you from Romania?

8. Jul 19, 2007

### Gib Z

Sorry Halls, I actually have no personal experience with this what so ever (although I have many times manually just applied $f(x)-f(x-1)$ ), so this was somewhat new to me.

However extremely coincidentally, in my thread "How Good Am I?" (which im sad you dont participate in :( ), yip just introduced to us an operator like that in one of his questions, and also in "Klaus_Hoffman"'s thread about the n-th difference of a function, lurflurf posted a link on wikipedia about Newton Series. When you press his link, it re directs to the article for the Difference Operator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_operator) and it was over there where I got the name "backward difference Operator" :( Perhaps it is called different things in different fields of mathematics? Or a less common name this is?

Last edited: Jul 20, 2007
9. Jul 20, 2007

### CompuChip

Are you? :tongue:

Nope, I'm from the land of tulips and clogs - I mean, 't Hooft and van der Waals

Why does [strike]...[/strike] not work?