Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Ωηερεφορε τηερεφορε



Another well we live & learn experience.

This piece was going to be about whatever happened to therefore, especially in its symbolic form of a triangle made out of three full stops.

That staple, useful shorthand, sine qua non of our school geometry textbooks, never seemed to appear as a symbol available for insertion into a Word document, whichever font you tried. Does this lack of a symbol mean that mathematicians do not even use the word 'therefore', or even the concept, these days?

But then, just doing a last minute check before finally committing to print, I find a Word font called Symbol which yes, does have a 

And just to add to the fun, when I typed my clever title (Wherefore therefore?) in the same font it came out in beautiful Greek.

That reminded me of the fun (& frustration) to be had with the old IBM golf balls when you forgot to change them when switching between typing formulae & typing text.

Except that none of this symbolism seems to want to transfer into Blogger.

Or does it, when published? There's only one way for me to find out