Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

Oh, this is fun!   Welcome, by the way.

1) In my opinion "denote by" is grammatically correct, if unusual.   This is true of pretty much any transitive verb; you can say "gunfire killed the victim" or "you killed the victim by means of gunfire" or "you killed the victim by gunfire".   You can let S denote the subset of N, or denote the subset of N by means of S, or denote the subset of N by S.   Moving the "by" phrase after the verb doesn't change the meaning, it's just what makes it sound awkward to your ear...and to mine, unless the object of the verb is long and involved.   Killing the victim by gunfire is pretty straightforward.   But denoting the subset of N consisting of numbers that leave the remainder 1 when divided by 4 by S is confusing; better to leave "by S" where your textbook had it.

2) I'm the merest dabbler in math, but in physics when a term loses its capitalization it's usually from lots and lots of use, and eventually they adopt the lower-case version by agreement.   They used to say water freezes at 273.15 degrees Kelvin, for instance; but they changed it and now water freezes at 273.15 kelvins.   In that case it would be wrong to capitalize it, because the convention was adopted officially and I would regard that as authoritative.   But where a commonly used proper noun becomes so routine that people begin to spell it in lower case—"machiavellian", for instance, "wagnerian", "boolean" or "euclidean"—I think you should feel free to capitalize the word or not as the mood and context strike you.

I hate to disagree with Bob Bridges -- he almost always gives good advice, and the new one, "bear", seems on point --, but "denote by" is just wrong.

Denote is a transitive verb. It always has an object noun post. "Denote by" is nonsensical.

Thanks, RobertB; you beat me to it.   ...Except come to think of it I don't think it's an indirect object, but something else.   JQ, if it helps to see this in a different example, consider another transitive verb "send".   If you send a package by mail, then "send" is the verb, "package" is the object of the verb and "by mail" indicates the means you used to send it (as opposed to "by courier" or "by throwing it over the fence into my front yard").

What makes it sound funny in bear's example is that the word order is switched around, as though I'd written that you sent by mail a package.   It's still correct, technically, but it isn't the way we'd usually say it.   Unless, that is, the verb's object is long and convoluted, requiring lots of words.   Suppose what you sent is a long white expensive heavily-insured suspicious-looking message in a bottle that requires extra postage?   In that case I could write "he sent a long white expensive heavily-insured suspicious-looking message in a bottle that requires extra postage by mail".   But stylistically speaking it would probably be clearer to write "he sent by mail a long white expensive heavily-insured suspicious-looking message in a bottle that requires extra postage".