Abstract
AbstractMany authors have commented on the relative frequency of the present tense—and the relative infrequency of the past tense—in mathematical writing. However, none (to our knowledge) have provided an estimate for the size of this effect or explored how universal it is. In this short note we report an analysis of corpora of mathematical and day-to-day English. We conclude that the present-to-past ratio of tenses is at least 3:1 in mathematical English, compared to approximately 5:7 in day-to-day English. Further, we show that this tendency to favour the present tense is almost universally present in written mathematics.
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Reference11 articles.
1. Banga R, Mehndiratta P (2017) Tagging efficiency analysis on part of speech taggers. In: 2017 international conference on information technology (ICIT), IEEE, pp 264–267
2. Bird S, Klein E, Loper E (2009) Natural language processing with Python: analyzing text with the natural language toolkit. O’Reilly Media Inc, Sebastopol, CA
3. Burton L, Morgan C (2000) Mathematicians writing. J Res Math Educ 31:429–453
4. Ganesalingam M (2013) The language of mathematics. Springer, Heidelberg, Germany
5. Johansson S, Leech G, Goodluck H (1978) Manual of information to accompany the Lancaster-Oslo/Bergen Corpus of British English, for use with digital computers. Department of English, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway