Talk:Minkowski's question-mark function

Just a comment, this has to be the worst example of bad choice of notation...what was he thinking?? Revolver 07:06, 21 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Dates back to the dawn of the discovery of pathological functions, at the turn of the 20th century. Maybe it was felt to be very confusing? And maybe he had a twisted sense of humour. linas 00:36, 22 May 2005 (UTC)Reply

Why is ? any crazier than ! (asks one who shorthands sin and cos with $ and ¢)? Kwantus 2005 June 29 17:52 (UTC)

Worse yet, it conflicts with a much more useful notation, d?k for the binomial coefficient d!/(d−k)!k!, generalizing to ?⟨i₀,…,i_n⟩ for the multinomial coefficient of a multi-index. Without regard for degree we can write

${\displaystyle ?I{\mathbf {x} }^{I}}$

as the general term of a multinomial expansion, where the multi-index exponent, as usual, means

${\displaystyle x_{0}^{i_{0}}x_{1}^{i_{1}}\cdots x_{n}^{i_{n}}}$,

and

${\displaystyle |I|=i_{0}+i_{1}+\cdots +i_{n}}$

equals the degree. Ah well; there's little chance of confusion. --KSmrq^T 20:53, 2005 August 31 (UTC)