# 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?

## 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.

• 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
• abstractmath.org also looks to be dead. I'll just leave a link to the Wayback Machine, hopefully this one never disappears. – Bladewood Mar 12 '19 at 1:38