Sex Bombe: Linguistics of Mathematics

Most of mathematics being written in natural language, it needs to be translated into formal language before it can be processed by a computer. As a first step towards automatic translation, I am studying how mathematical writing works from the grammatical point of view by examining examples.

In order to further simplify the task to manageable proportions, I shall restrict the class of mathematical statements considered to those which are equivalent to formal mathematical expressions as opposed to ones which describe mathematical ideas generally and convey intuition. For instance, the sentence "The integral of the form $\omega$ over the boundary of the domain $D$ equals the integral of the exterior derivative of the form over the domain." means the same thing as the equation

$\begin{displaymath} \int_{\partial D} \omega = \int_{D} d \omega , \end{displaymath}$ (1) whilst the sentence "Stokes' theorem may be seen as a generalization of the fundamental theorem of calculus to more than one variable." is not equivalent to a mathematical expression, but rather describes the thought processes of a mathematician. While trying to understand mathematical intuition, let alone trying to implement it on a computer is a fascinating and important subject, it is also quite difficult (I am not even sure where I would begin in studying this topic.), so restricting attention to figuring out how to translate certain statements in natural language into their formal equivalents sounds like a reasonable way to get started.