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.
Comment on I dunno
cobysev@lemmy.world 2 weeks agoThe 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.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
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.
Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Interesting! Nobody at my institute is a native English speaker. They’re from several European and some Asian and south American countries.
DarkCloud@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, but as an adult it depends entirely on whether you’re in an industry or hobby that requires that level of bracket nuance/exponents.
Most of us are just trying to remember the basics.
SmartmanApps@programming.dev 3 days ago
They’re all brackets. Parentheses is actually the part inside the ().