Hacker News Reader

... What? That's just symbol soup. What are you trying to write? Do it in latex if it helps.

It's not symbol soup, it's projective coordinates. Did you claim to be a mathematician? I merely have a PhD in Mathematics and a few papers in peer-review journals, so, unlike you, not a real mathematician, and I immediately understood the point.

Uh... I have a PhD, I'm a tenured professor, and I even supervise a couple of PhD students. How about you? Given your snarky tone, it sounds like you'd have mentioned something like this. Not sure why you'd try to flex when you don't know much about me ;)

With my font, the letter l looked like a vertical bar |. Hence why this looked like symbol soup. But okay, let's say it's about projective spaces. Then surely, you realize that the equal sign still denotes equality. The point [1:2] is literally equal to [2:4] in P^2, not "proportional". Perhaps you need a refresher: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equivalence_class#quotient_set

I used l instead of \lambda, my bad I guess. My point was that the equality sign = is used to denote equality between projective points [x:y] = [ax:ay] and also proportionality between the ordered pairs [x:y] = [ax:ay], just depending on how you read and understand it.

I later remembered fractions a/b = ac/bc work this way too!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com