# Is there such a thing as a mathematical thesaurus?

I want this for two reasons:

1. When writing proofs, I am constantly in need of synonyms of basic words like thus, there exists, for all, such as, contains, etc.

2. A lot of mathematical concepts have multiple names, e.g. abelianization vs derived quotient, vanishes vs goes to $0$, and so on.

A big list of either of these types of synonyms would help improve the flow of my mathematical writing. Also, the latter case would familiarize me with alternative terminology I may run into later.

Does anything like this exist?

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I'm not aware of one, but someone (maybe you?) should make one! –  Suugaku Apr 8 '13 at 5:33
@Suugaku if this question doesn't turn up with anything maybe I'll make a wiki or something. –  Alexander Gruber Apr 8 '13 at 5:40
Perhaps some of the Dictionaries and resources for translation of mathematical terminology can be useful for finding synonyms, too. (Quite often Wikipedia can do the job.) You said that you are interested in this because you want to improve the style of your proofs. So these two posts can be interesting for you: What are or where can I find style guidelines for writing math?; Book about technical and academic writing.... (cont) –  Martin Sleziak Apr 8 '13 at 5:48
(cont)... In particular, Trzeciak's book has concrete examples of sentences and phrases useful in various situations. –  Martin Sleziak Apr 8 '13 at 5:50

## 1 Answer

There is a very comprehensive (at least very long!) "Handbook of Mathematical Discourse" which you can find here.

Under the various topics they list some synonyms, but I can't vouch for its completeness or accuracy. Also, it is more of a dictionary or encyclopedia than a pure thesaurus.

EDIT: Another question on Math.SE asks a similar question and one of the answers points to this online encyclopedia. It seems, however, that this one might be of limited use as a thesaurus. After a few tries it looks like synonyms are rarely included.

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Wow. Not exactly what I was looking for but still a great find. Gonna be using that one. –  Alexander Gruber Apr 8 '13 at 5:43
@AlexanderGruber Yea, it also seems that the intended audience is advanced undergraduates and early grads. Maybe more use as a pedagogical tool. –  Dennis Apr 8 '13 at 5:45
The link to the handbook in the answer is dead, but abstractmath.org/Books/handbkhyper.pdf works. (I got it from here.) –  Mark S. Dec 2 '13 at 3:00