Mike Andrews wrote:

In (rec.radio.amateur.homebrew), Tim
Wescott wrote:

Yes, it's pronounced "sink", and it's quite common in signal processing.
You define it as being the _limit_ of sin(x)/x as x - 0 because
otherwise it's undefined at zero, and all the mathematicians in the crowd
will curse at you for being yet another engineer who's treating math so
casually.

That's not precisely true.

Some fraction of us mathematicians wander away, shaking our heads and
muttering "Engineers!" under our breaths.


Reminds me of the old joke about the mathemetician, the physicist and the
engineer. They were each shown into a room in the centre of which was £50
note / $100 bill (depending on which side of the pond you live).

They were told they could walk half the distance to the money and stop.
Then they could walk half the remaining ditance and so on until they got
the money.

The mathemetician worked out you would never reach the money so he didn't
even try. The physicist, working to five decimal places was still there a
week later. The engineer did three iterations, said 'That's close enough'
and picked up the money.

The moral is of course, horses for courses.

Ian