[Fhsst-authors] i get confused sometimes...

[Sam Halliday]

i have just spent the whole week getting really confused about what a
function is, and what it is not... sparked by the thing in the
hsalgebra.tex file... and i think i have it all sorted out now:

turns out that the naming conventions are totally mad... a single-valued
function is a function, but a multi-valued function is not a function
despie having it in its name!

what "function" means really depends on what disciple you are from...
some disciples (physics in particular) mean "function" to mean
"generalised function"
[http://mathworld.wolfram.com/GeneralizedFunction.html], and
mathematicians tend to let it mean "single-valued function with a few
extra disciple-specific things; like specific integral/differential
properties. but mathematicians will tend to define the properties of any
function explicitly; so thats why its not that big a deal.

a multi-valued function does not meet the constraint of either of these
definitions. i would probably prefer it if the name was changed to
something not containing the word function in it.

so, in conclusion i don't think we need to worry about defining the word
"function" in hsalgebra.tex as it will just lead to a hellova lot of
confusion... lets just define a single-valued function and say that we
will call this a function from here on in...

i'll try to remove all the \nts{} that i made last week before you start
editing, clare.

cheers,
Sam
-- 
Free High School Science Texts
  http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/fhsst
Sam's Homepages
  http://fommil.homeunix.org/~samuel
  http://www.ma.hw.ac.uk/~samuel