I dunno (piefed.cdn.blahaj.zone)
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] 22 points 11 months ago (5 children)

The way I was taught growing up, brackets are [these]. Parenthesis are (these).

Yes, technically the latter are also brackets. But they can also be called parenthesis, whereas the former is exclusively a bracket. So we were taught to call them separate words to differentiate while doing equations.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 5 child comments
  • [–] 7 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    I'm a theoretical physics grad student and a night school maths teacher, I have never heard this distinction. People in academia around me call them round and square brackets.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 2 child comments
  • [–] 9 points 11 months ago (1 child)

    It's a US vs UK (and probably others) distinction. The ( ) are almost never called brackets in the US, unless it's a regional thing I'm not aware of. Also the [ ] didn't get used in any math classes I was in the US up through calculus except for matrices.

  • source
  • parent
  • hideshow 1 child comment