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Re: integrals

thanks to sami sozuer for the physics references -- this is precisely
the sort of background material that we've asked to be pointed out.

he also asks the professional background of the members of the mfg.
i won't speak for the others, but my own background includes
undergraduate work in applied math (though i ended up in linguistics
in graduate school) and more than 20 years specializing in math
typesetting for the american math society, including installing two
math typesetting systems in-house, which included making sure that the
font sets were adequate for the needs of research math.  on the other
hand, i know my background is weak in the practices of advanced
physics, engineering, and other applied areas -- which is the reason
i've insisted that the group ask for representatives of these
disciplines to help by citing examples of actual practice.

i have a strong personal interest in making the tools and user
interfaces to those tools suitable, powerful and flexible.  i don't
intend the product of this working group to turn out otherwise.

actually, i'm not sure why "\bf\Gamma vs. \bf\gamma" is a turnoff.
it can't be that \bf is needed -- that's the same in both parts;
it seems unlikely that it's the need to distinguish between a cap
and a lowercase gamma -- at least in math that distinction must
be made sometimes within the same expression.  i'd really appreciate
learning from mr. sozuer, off-line if he prefers, what would make
the tex input language more usable by physicists.  (short of having
a mouse-and-menu interface as the only input, of course -- that is
counter to what is able to be called tex, by knuth's rules.  it
could certainly be provided by a third party as an added front end,
but isn't part of our present task, which is to make available the
alphabets and symbols that users of tex really need for their
technical notation, arranged into groupings that are effective for
producing their documents.)
						-- bb