A notation disperses beyond its inventor only after a formal event — publication or institutionalization — not through casual person-to-person contact

history-of-notationhcinotationtransmissiongeneral-theory

A 2026 comparative-historical study of notation development across mathematics, physics, chemistry, dance, sign-language writing, and computing (Zhang, Glassman, et al., "How Notations Evolve") proposes a three-stage social model: "invention and incubation" (a notation exists privately, serving its inventor's own purposes), then "dispersion and divergence," then "institutionalization and sanctification." The move from the first stage to the second is not automatic: dispersion "typically follows an initial publication in the form of a book, academic journal, or mass media release," and institutionalization requires "committees and institutions... established by notation developers and users to counter-act notation divergence."

This matches, at the level of general mechanism, the vault's already-recorded Nemeth case: claim-nemeth-code-stayed-private-until-witcher-request documents a private notation staying private until an outside circumstance (a colleague's request) forced disclosure, after which it reached the Joint Uniform Braille Committee and institutionalized quickly. On this general account, the mechanism is not peculiar to blind mathematicians or to Nemeth specifically: informal person-to-person contact of the kind documented for claim-antoine-personally-taught-his-method-to-morin is exactly the kind of contact that can transmit a verbally-describable method but is not, on this model, sufficient to disperse a notation — a notation additionally requires the recipient to learn a whole symbol system, not just follow an explanation in ambient language. See question-why-blind-math-notation-doesnt-transmit-while-method-does for the open asymmetry this bears on.