Penn Professors on Writing in Mathematics
Professor David Harbater
About the Professor
David Harbater is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor in the School of Arts and Sciences. He earned his A.B at Harvard and his Ph.D. from MIT. In 1995, he received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching here at the University of Pennsylvania. According to Dr. Harbater, "Good mathematical writing is good mathematical thinking."
For more about Professor Harbater, please visit his Faculty Page.
Writing Process
"Writing a paper can take years; the main issue is that we're constantly developing new methods. We use existing methods, but we also may develop whole new methods that we can apply to get new results. I've been working on the same paper for two years. Meanwhile I've submitted several other papers, but this one’s been number one throughout. I have two co-authors, and we’re still adding things! When writing mathematics, one has to let it grow organically like a plant. It grows on its own, and then you trim it."
Mathematical Writing
"Mathematical writing is didactic and Platonic. There's this notion of things that exist on their own, independent of us. Unlike much writing in the humanities, math writing is almost written in an omniscient voice. The style is very formal and objective, and purged of ambiguity. We include side comments and remarks that make our writing very formal and quite similar to legal writing. Yet the foundations and proofs are so core that we have an even higher standard of evidence than one encounters in legal writing, where there may be room for doubt."
Links
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