Non-mathematician here. There is a discussion on this forum titled "Is “applying similar operations from left to right” a convention or a rule that forces us to mark one answer wrong?" I found it trying to answer a question I have. I could not comment as I am new here (trolling protection I guess) My interest is software localisation. My question is whether mathematics is globally written Left to Right (LTR). i.e. do those substantial countries that use a RTL languages adopt an LTR standard for mathematics (in the same way they often do when using LTR words or phrases).
Note that I am not asking what is mathematically correct (i.e. use parenthesis properly) - I am asking what is commonly actually done? Thanks
Most university-level math education has conformed to a left-to-right standard, regardless of how the native language is written. However, pre-university education differs, and it depends on the region.
For instance, see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Arabic_mathematical_notation.
One of the reasons for the predominance of left-to-right mathematical writing is that a majority of mathematical papers are written in left-to-right languages. Furthermore, it is difficult to find equivalent texts for some (advanced) topics written in a right-to-left sense. Even translation is particularly difficult. While there might be a translation for "limit" or "derivative" in some languages, there often isn't a direct translation for something like "cotangent bundle" or "Hom functor." How does one translate an advanced text when the nomenclature is so-far removed from the native language? (One may even argue that some of the nomenclature is pretty far removed from English, as well. "Eigenvector" is a horrible Frankenstein's monster of a word, grammatically speaking. And don't even get me started on "homomorphism" vs. "homeomorphism").
In fact, this phenomenon has led to English becoming almost mandatory for university-level technical education in many countries.