On 2/28/07, Delirium <delirium(a)hackish.org> wrote:
occasionally get hammered out, usually consisting of
an introductory
sentence or two that uses the word "informally" to signal that this
isn't technically the correct definition, but more of a hand-wavy
intuition about the subject. I think that can be done for more
articles, but it's kind of a slow process, and the mathematicians do
have a point that we don't want to write inaccurate pop-math either.
Hmm. Readability is more important than accuracy and precision for the
first few sentences. Why not something like: "Smith's theorem states
that there are no six digit prime numbers. More precisely, it states
that there is no real number n, 100000<= n <= 999999 such that...."?
Actually this happens a lot in political science
articles too, in my
experience. The first sentence defining a fairly simple topic will
often contain at least several jargon words I don't know, in the
interests of treating with extreme precision some legal obscurity
(especially legal fictions).
As long as there is both a readable summary and an accurate, concise
summary in the opening paragraph, everyone's interests are served.
Steve