On 2/28/07, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
occasionally get hammered out, usually consisting of an introductory sentence or two that uses the word "informally" to signal that this isn't technically the correct definition, but more of a hand-wavy intuition about the subject. I think that can be done for more articles, but it's kind of a slow process, and the mathematicians do have a point that we don't want to write inaccurate pop-math either.
Hmm. Readability is more important than accuracy and precision for the first few sentences. Why not something like: "Smith's theorem states that there are no six digit prime numbers. More precisely, it states that there is no real number n, 100000<= n <= 999999 such that...."?
Actually this happens a lot in political science articles too, in my experience. The first sentence defining a fairly simple topic will often contain at least several jargon words I don't know, in the interests of treating with extreme precision some legal obscurity (especially legal fictions).
As long as there is both a readable summary and an accurate, concise summary in the opening paragraph, everyone's interests are served.
Steve