this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Science Memes

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[–] Droggelbecher@lemmy.world 3 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 3 points 7 hours ago (1 children)

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 1 points 6 hours ago

Interesting! Nobody at my institute is a native English speaker. They're from several European and some Asian and south American countries.