Talk:differentiant

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differentiant

I stumbled onto that old mathematical word while finding citations for WT:RFV#quindenary. Any idea how to define it (differentiant)? More citations are to be found on Google Books, google books:"differentiant". - -sche (discuss) 02:07, 1 July 2015 (UTC)

Story seems to be saying that a differentiant relative to $xy$ is a quantic that's invariant under all transformations of the form $y\mapsto y+cx$ for any constant $c$; and that a complete differentiant is a quantic that's a differentiant relative to every pair of variables in the quantic. The article by Sylvester that bgc turns up in various reprints has a definition that I can't understand (at least not in my current, tired state), but Story claims it's the same as his own. Among the first few pages of bgc results, those two cites (and summaries thereof in reviews) are all I found in English about math, but on a later page I found Crilly, who uses the term to possibly mean the same thing: I can't tell. [1] has a bit of history about Sylvester relating to this term. That's all I see on bgc — and I do not now feel comfortable writing a definition. Maybe some other time; or maybe you can write one based on what the steps I've documented here thus far.​—msh210℠ 05:23, 1 July 2015 (UTC)