The Notation reference article from the English Wikipedia on 24-Apr-2004 (provided by Fixed Reference: snapshots of Wikipedia from wikipedia.org)

Notation

A notation can be used in several contexts:

1. In musical composition, the music is represented by musical notation
2. In chemistry, the Lewis notation denotes chemical bonds
3. In quantum mechanics, Dirac's Bra-ket notation is another representation of probability amplititudes
4. In relativity, for example, Tensor notation is a general way to represent a gravitational field
5. In mathematics, mathematical notation is used to represent mathematical ideas, such as:

• Numeral systems, notation for writing numbers
• Positional notation, which made writing numbers more systematic than a tally method like Roman numerals
• binary notation, a positional notation in base two
• decimal notation, a positional notation in base ten
• scientific notation for expressing large and small numbers
• Conway's chained arrow, Knuth's up-arrow notation and Steinhaus polygon notation can represent much larger quantities than scientific notation

• Cartesian Coordinate System, for representing position and other spatial concepts in analytic geometry

• Leibnitz notation is the standard representation for Calculus

• Big O notation, used for example in analysis to represent less significant elements of an expression, to indicate that they will be neglected

• Infix notation for representing calculations in an almost linguistic format, such as a+b-c
• Prefix notation or Polish notation, which places the operator before the operands, such as + a b
• Postfix notation or Reverse Polish Notation, which places the operator after the operands, such as a b +

• Z notation - a formal notation for specifying objects using Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and first-order predicate logic

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