There are common words, rarely used in a technical sense, that however may be useful as explanatory marginal alternatives of foreign words. The "ab...ment d.. " being discussed seems to be explained by "goal", as in f is the goal of F where F is the Fourer series of a function f (which leaves to particular investigation the question of actual convergence). In turn "goal" can be helpfully explained as purpose a concept that academic discussions should not forget. Bill On Thu 08/21/08 3:18 PM , Vaughan Pratt pratt@cs.stanford.edu sent:
Meanwhile I count eight occurrences of "abut" and "abutment" in the (36kilobyte!) main Wikipedia article on spectral sequences (there are a dozen separate much shorter articles on particular spectral sequences, along with a 15 kB article on derived categories).
On the other hand the algebra and geometry articles of the 1987 Britannica Macropaedia both prefer the term "limit" for what a spectralsequence converges to, in respectively Peter Hilton's contribution "Other aspects of homological algebra" to the algebra article, and thegeometry article's section on algebraic topology.
Since Wikipedia seems to be trumping Britannica these days, and no one here has objected to established usage in mathematics trumping linguistic suitability, the precise distance of "abutment" from theoptimal English cognate for "aboutissement" would appear to be academic,an epithet reflecting the outside world's perception that raising moot points is in our job description.
Vaughan
Thanks to Eduardo D and Vaughan P and Michel H for their misgivings,>> which encouraged me to compose the above, despite the assurances>> of Jim S that the 'abut*' usage is by now well entrenched.>> Fred