A snippet from Marcus du Sautoy's The Number Mysteries, Chapter 3, in the section called HOW GOOD ARE YOU AT RANDOMNESS is shown below. My question is, why does the author use superscripts instead of subscripts here?
Why are superscripts used instead of subscripts in this example?
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$\begingroup$
notation
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4No other reason than personal preference. – 2011-09-26
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10It's poor notation especially here though, with $2^N$ used in one line and $g^N$ in the next, with different meanings for the $^N$. – 2011-09-26
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2Maybe nobody bothered to proofread. – 2011-09-26
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1Or the proofreader didn't know any better, mathematically speaking. – 2011-09-26
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3@Andre and J.M.'s suggestions are surprisingly plausible. I recently sent in a proof-revision for a paper that I wrote where the journal's typesetters managed to systematically convert every instance of $T_pM$ (the tangent space of the manifold $M$ at the point $p$) to look like $T_{pM}$. A lot of crazy things happen at the type-setting stage for mathematics books and papers. – 2011-09-28
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1Before the widespread use of TeX, and the possibility that the author does the typesetting, it would be quite common that the typesetter did not know mathematics. – 2011-09-28
1 Answers
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I used subscripts in the UK edition but the US edition seems to have flipped it to a superscript. Superscripts of course have a different meaning so it is definitely a bad choice. Thanks for pointing this out.
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0Ha ha you guys have me to thank for bringing Marcus du Sautoy to Math.SE! – 2016-05-11