Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Mathematics/2017 July 10

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July 10

Missing macros in <math /> environment

Dear mathematicians;-)

I got a request on phabricator for new math commands. I hope there will be a slight update of the Math extension and the underlying services in the next (two) month, which will finally abandon the old rendering mode. Thus there will be the chance for expanding the texvc language and the incorporation of new commands, like done previously with

$$\oiint \quad \oiiint \quad \ointctrclockwise \quad \varointclockwise$$

in June 2016. Are these macros proposed by the linked phabricator task really required by a "the community"? I personally have doubts about the really wide hat and the stroked integral symbol.

--Physikerwelt (talk) 00:06, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

@Physikerwelt: The stroked (or dashed) integral is commonly used in the analysis of PDEs for averages, and in other fields used for Cauchy principal values. I find it useful. —Kusma (t·c) 12:58, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Wide hats are nice, and are indeed commonly used in the LaTeX community. See e.g. here [1] some if this is for aesthetics, but sometimes it conveys important clarifying info. Consider that ${\hat {x}}$ looks fine and unambiguous, while ${\hat {xyz}}$ is potentially confusing. Does the hat apply to the y, the x, or the whole product? ${\widehat {xyz}}$, using "widehat" would be much clearer. Better than a "really wide" would be a variable width hat, as discussed here [2], as currently widehat doesn't work well for things like ${\widehat {xyzabc\alpha \beta \gamma }}$ . How much this appears "in the wild" or on WP, and the relative urgency filling this need is debatable, but it is indeed a real thing that real mathematicians use sometimes, and as such is a good inclusion for WP math macros. One instance for needing a really wide hat (more realistic than simply hatting a long product) is if you want to hat an entire integral or something. SemanticMantis (talk) 17:17, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

By the way, the macro for the really wide hat (that is, variable size!) is stolen from precisely the location that you mentioned.--Mathmensch (talk) 04:57, 11 July 2017 (UTC)

As the creator of the request, I support it wholeheartedly, also in view of my examples on sharelatex. --Mathmensch (talk) 18:53, 10 July 2017 (UTC)