Association Guidelines

Associations as what connect your mathematical contribution to the rest of the body of mathematics, as represented on Physics Library. Three types of associations are supported: Synonyms, Related (aka "See Also's"), and Keywords. The difference between these types is that:

Synonyms are basically other things you could have chosen for the title of your object. If you had to arbitrarily choose from one of many titles, you should definitely enter in all the titles you can think of. Why? Because someone else might know of your theorem by another oft-used name, and might miss it if you haven't associated the theorem with this name at all. For example, a single mathematical conjecture is known as "The Collatz Problem", "Ulam's Problem", "Kakutani's Problem", and possibly many more. All of these are prime synonyms for the mathematical item. Remember that different countries or even universities may use particular sets of names as convention; we'd like to smooth over this impediment to communication of mathematics. Synonyms are free-form natural language titles.

Related items are more loosely defined; they are essentially anything you feel is related (mathematically) to the item you are submitting. This could involve applications of your item, things that are easier to understand using it, or things that make it easier to understand, etc. The general idea here is that related things will either help the user's understanding of both your item and mathematics in general. Related items will show up under the "See Also" section of a displayed math object. You can always leave things out, however, and add more of these associations when the related items are added to Physics Library. Related entries should be in the form of canonical names.

Keywords have a simple purpose; to help make your item more searchable. To think of keywords, imagine that your item is the answer to someone's problem or question. The user of Physics Library may just need to look up the exact statement of the solution, but might not know the title of it. Or, they may know how to name some things about the problem which your mathetmatical item addresses, or they may know some related things, but nothing about the statement or title of it. You want keywords that will help home in on your item in these situations. Note that keywords are distinct from synonyms in that keywords will not appear within the glossary index itself, so you shouldn't repeat synonyms in keywords. Keywords should be entered as free-form strings.

All three of these methods of association should be entered as comma-separated lists in case any one of them consists of more than one entry.

Appendix.

Canonical Names

Physics Library canonical object names are formed by an object title with the first letter of each word capitalized, punctuation removed, and spaces removed. Canonical names are unique for each object and guaranteed to be persistent (just like object id's). Think of canonical names as a human-readable unique id. For example, "Jordan's Totient Function" would have canonical name JordansTotientFunction. Some entries need to use canonical names because the provide structural information -- that is, they will allow a user to click on something to go to another object within Physics Library.

Canonical names are displayed at object viewing time, along with the object's unique id.