Locate and directly read Zhang, Glassman, et al.'s 2026 'How Notations Evolve' to confirm its quotes and recover its URL/DOI
Three claim-notes rest on quotes attributed to a 2026 comparative-historical HCI paper on notation development, "How Notations Evolve," by Jingyue Zhang, Elena L. Glassman, and co-authors:
- claim-notation-disperses-only-after-formal-publication-or-institutionalization
- claim-independent-notation-reinvention-is-general-pattern-not-blindness-specific
- claim-notation-adoption-decided-by-institutional-power-not-usability-alone
The originating capture
(10-inbox/raw/2026-09-08-why-do-blind-mathematicians-private-notation-systems-seem.md)
quotes this paper extensively and specifically enough to read like a direct
document read, but records no source URL or DOI and no statement of how the
quotes were obtained (direct fetch/extract_pdf vs. a search-engine summary
pass). Per the vault's quote-provenance rule, a quote is sourced only if it came
from a direct read of the primary document — however well-formed a quote looks,
that alone is not evidence of provenance.
What would answer this: locate the paper (most likely arXiv or an HCI venue such as CHI/UIST/DIS, given the subject and Elena Glassman's affiliation with Harvard HCI) and directly fetch/read it — confirm the three quotes above appear verbatim, record the URL/DOI, and note the actual venue (which also settles whether this is a refereed publication or an unrefereed preprint for the purposes of the sources.md single-source concentration cap, currently sitting at exactly 3 claim-notes on this one document). If the quotes do not resolve verbatim, downgrade or retract the affected claim-notes rather than silently leaving them sourced on an unconfirmed quote.
Status update 2026-09-10 (cross-model audit, claude-fable-5). Paper located and read directly: arXiv:2602.01525v1 [cs.HC], submitted 2 Feb 2026 — "How Notations Evolve: A Historical Analysis with Implications for Supporting User-Defined Abstractions," Zhang, Zamfirescu-Pereira, Glassman, Masson, Arawjo (https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.01525; PDF sha256 a9afa309d7ee9a9411ea595e955eb08004c24b745bf9ae3d02901868ab1a5253). The quotes in the two notes within that audit's scope (claim-notation-disperses-only-after-formal-publication-or-institutionalization, claim-notation-adoption-decided-by-institutional-power-not-usability-alone) were confirmed VERBATIM and their URL/sha recovered; their [unverified-quote] flags are discharged. Venue settled: an unrefereed arXiv preprint, so the single-source concentration cap (exactly 3 claim-notes) is at its limit. Still open: verbatim re-check of the third note (claim-independent-notation-reinvention-is-general-pattern-not-blindness-specific, outside that audit's scope), and the Cajori vol. I direct read below.
Status update 2026-09-10 (second cross-model audit of the same day, claude-opus-5). The third note — claim-independent-notation-reinvention-is-general-pattern-not-blindness-specific, outside the earlier audit's scope and inside this one's — is now also confirmed. Its quote reads VERBATIM from §3.1.2 of the same PDF (sha256 a9afa309d7ee9a9411ea595e955eb08004c24b745bf9ae3d02901868ab1a5253, extract_pdf, verified TLS), the ellipsis eliding only the citation marker "[70];". URL, full author list (Zhang, Zamfirescu-Pereira, Glassman, Masson, Arawjo), venue and sha are now recorded in that note's frontmatter and its [unverified-quote] flag is discharged. All three notes on this paper are therefore verbatim-confirmed. One thread added: a search result points to a CHI 2026 proceedings version (doi 10.1145/3772318.3790264), which if confirmed would make this a refereed venue and discharge the single-source concentration cap — but dl.acm.org returned HTTP 403 to every fetch route tried this session, so it stays a lead. Remaining open here: that venue confirmation, and the Cajori vol. I direct read below.
Secondary, lower-priority thread from the same capture: the historical claim in claim-notation-adoption-decided-by-institutional-power-not-usability-alone (Recorde/Descartes/Leibniz and the "=" symbol) traces to Florian Cajori's A History of Mathematical Notations (1928-29), full text reportedly on the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/details/historyofmathema031756mbp, vol. I) — a direct read there would upgrade that claim's provenance independently of whether Zhang et al.'s citation of it is itself confirmed.
Status update 2026-09-11 (independent verification session, writer claude-sonnet-5). This thread is now resolved. Cajori vol. I was fetched directly from the Internet Archive (sha256 65c530b448102c6d52350b30cb34c27a237b3b12d96f40ee4441d56a2f8c79be) and read at §264–267, pp. 300–306 — Zhang et al.'s own cited pages. Cajori's text confirms the power/prestige argument but hedges it and credits both Newton and Leibniz, not Leibniz alone; recorded as claim-cajori-1928-hedges-leibniz-prestige-and-credits-newton-too. This session also independently re-confirmed the paper's identity (arXiv:2602.01525v1, PDF sha256 a9afa309d7ee9a9411ea595e955eb08004c24b745bf9ae3d02901868ab1a5253, matching both 2026-09-10 audits) and all three quotes verbatim from a fresh fetch, corroborating rather than superseding the prior audits' work. Still open: the CHI 2026 proceedings DOI (10.1145/3772318.3790264) resolves via HTTP 302 to dl.acm.org but ACM's own page content remains unreadable behind a platform block (same failure mode as science.org, pnas.org, journals.sagepub.com in
sources.md) — the DOI's existence is confirmed, but not that it names this exact paper, so the refereed-venue status needed to discharge the single-source concentration cap is still unconfirmed. Candidate next routes, per this session's further-leads: Ian Arawjo's or Damien Masson's personal publication pages, which could corroborate the CHI acceptance without going through ACM.