At a recent conference, I witnessed a speaker talking about paralyzing various computer codes for better performance. If this sounds confusing, you are absolutely right. The speaker was merely pronouncing the word parallelize incorrectly. The OED includes the following meaning for the verb paralyze: to prevent something from functioning normally and its pronunciation as (listen
I’m quite sure that even people who are not very confident about their English in general would not hesitate to claim that they can of course count to five. However, if you take pronunciation into consideration, this is not be true for many of them. (This post was inspired by an announcement I recently heard
At a physics conference I attended last week in Berlin, I came across yet another example of tricky distinctions to master. Several speakers confused the words monotonic or monotone with monotonous. While these words can be used interchangeably in some situations, only monotonic and monotone are correct in a mathematical context. The Oxford online dictionary
Non-native speakers often struggle when they have to speak about powers. For example, the correct expression used for is ten to the power of three, although it is common to instead use the shorter form ten to the three. Similarly, is x to the (power of) seven. The exponents 2 and 3 (can you think
Two common mistakes are “nominator” instead of “numerator”, and “denumerator” instead of “denominator”.
Since a substantial part of the material covered in this blog comes from my encounters with scientific papers and talks, I am wondering how many of you would actually like to get feedback regarding potential shortcomings regarding their English skills. I have never been a fan of public practise talks, simply because I think that
As you may remember from school, the bell-shaped curve that plays a key role in statistics, often referred to as a normal distribution, is also called a Gaussian. I have noticed that there is a lot of confusion and variation regarding the pronunciation of the word Gaussian, in particular among German native speakers. The reason
Here are two common mistakes related to series. 1) A series is called a series but not a row (a false friend related to the German word Reihe). 2) A function is expanded in (or as) a series. German native speakers often make the mistake of saying “to develop [a function] in a series” (the
The Greek alphabet is used in many fields, including science (mostly physics and mathematics, where one often runs out of letters to use in equations), finance, and technology. Some of you may even use it on a post card from your holiday in Greece. Once you are able to write and correctly identify a given