How do you hyphenate or use a dash in the names of mathematical concepts? And are they capitalised?

🤓 I enjoyed the maths!

There’s a sentence I never thought I’d say.

🔎 I’ve recently proofread ‘The Nick Warner Chronicles Vol II’, an adventure-filled Bildungsroman about the life of a maths genius.

Nick navigates tricky life circumstances by applying maths.

🔎 As part of the edit, I checked every hypothesis, theory, concept and formula, ensuring conventions were followed and choices were consistent.

🔢 Riemann Hypothesis / hypothesis?

🔢 Dataset / data set?

🔢 Fermat’s Last Theorem / last theorem?

🔢 Lagrange Multiplier / multiplier?

What’s the answer? Research revealed concepts are styled differently depending on where you look. Helpful. 😅 So, decisions were based on most common style choice by authorities with the most relevance.

🔎 Favourite maths-based spot? Ensuring dashes between concepts named after mathematicians were correct.

❌ It’s not the Riemann-Siegel formula.

✅ It’s the Riemann–Siegel formula. An unspaced en dash gives equal prominence to both mathematicians.

So, did I enjoy the maths? Or did I enjoy the grammar around the maths? Sprung! 😜Honestly, it was both. Ines Strohschein, if Nick had been in my life at school I might have found a love for the subject!