Notation - Definition and Overview

The word notation can be used in several senses:

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 dance various forms of dance notation are used to document movement such as Labanotation and Benesh Notation
6. 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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