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Google Ngram Viewer
Posted:
Jan 9, 2011 1:44 AM
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Google released a powerful tool for analysis of long-term cultural trends: Google Ngram Viewer, http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/, which is a database of 500 billion words - mainly in English - and their occurrence in books over the last 2 centuries. Ngram Viewer is explained here http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/info.
I tried to attach a graph for logarithm,square root,exponent,cosine from 1880 to 2008 but the picture attachments was duly blocked by the mailing list. From 1960-s, all mathematical terms appear to show a steady and significant decline in frequency of their occurrence in books.
If you wish to run proper statistical analysis, Google kindly provides files with raw data.
Alexandre
Professor Alexandre Borovik * http://www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~avb/
Blog: http://micromath.wordpress.com/
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