| I still don't like it. I know it is rude and dangerous
| to speculate about other people's thought processes, but
| I suspect something like the following may be going on:
|
| 1) Fact: any exact one-form can be written as d(something).
| 2) Fact: a non-exact one-form cannot be written as d(anything).
| 3) Non-experts think it would be nice to write all
| one-forms as d(something), perhaps thinking that
| the "d" shows it is a one-form.
| 4) They've been told they can't write d(W) so they
| write dbar(W). . . . From: "John S. Denker"
|
Broaden your vocabulary, John. dbar is a long-time honored notation
meaning delta in the sense of a quantity of something. In fact the "bar"
expressly denotes that it is not the differential of any function. It is
so well understood in the context of the FLT that many of us feel free to
simply write dQ and dW, when restricted to ASCII.